Burger King doesn’t have to give you the whopper you’ve paid for.

The analogy breaks down because BK has an immediate cash-for-commodity relationship with the clients. If you had BK a $5 and they don’t give you a sandwich, you stop going.

But insurance takes your $5 up front in exchange for assuming the risk that you might need care in the future. You keep giving UHC $5 day after day and week after week, receiving nothing tangible in exchange. It is only when the risk materializes, at the moment you need care, that you ask UHC for money back and they say “No”.

This leads some people to advocate for health savings accounts as a replacement for private insurance. But then you have to deal with the possibility of a medical claim that exceeds your balance. So you get conversations about risk-pooling. But that just takes you back around to insurance companies again.

All of this is in an effort to discourage people from implementing public free-at-point-of-use health care (a la the NHS). The idea that we would simply have hospitals you can go to when you’re sick, in the same way we have elementary schools to go to when you’re young or fire departments to go to when you are on fire, is so totally alien to the hyper-individualist profit-fixated neoliberal capitalist that it never seems to come up in conversation.