South By North Strategies, Ltd.

James Kwak points out that health insurance has a value as insurance, meaning security against illness and financial loss, even if someone who is insured is fortunate enough never to become ill and draw on a policy.

…Health insurance, like any kind of insurance, can be framed after the fact as redistribution. You pay health insurance premiums, you stay healthy, and therefore you “lose”—your money goes to pay for other people’s losses. But this is true of any kind of insurance….
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The other way to think of insurance is, well, as insurance. We want and value insurance in the current period, before we know if we’ll be “winners” or “losers” in the future period. The insurance itself has value to us. In fact, whenever you buy insurance, you are hoping that you will end up as a loser.
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The framing of the health care individual mandate as a transfer from the healthy to the sick is the exact same as the framing of tax-funded social insurance programs as a transfer from the rich to the poor. At the time you enter the system, you probably don’t know which category you will fall into. You might have some knowledge of the probabilities, but you could turn out to be very wrong: there are plenty of people who are healthy in their twenties but get very sick later. In either case, the framing as redistribution and the focus on winners and losers is a way of making something that all people value—protection from risk, backed by the federal government’s balance sheet—seem like a from of zero-sum redistribution brokered by that evil, meddling federal government.