[domenzain]

It makes good financial sense for insurers to push the insured to take preventative measures.

An insurer should provide incentive to bring a building up to code to avoid a costly fire. The option to simply raise prices accounting for the fire leaves out the business of those who cannot afford it: the people leaving in a building that's not up to code.

[elgenie]

> "It makes good financial sense for insurers to push the insured to take preventative measures."

This is only true in a well-designed system. In a system in which insurance policies are for a one-year term and can be declined or premium-hiked as necessary after that term is up, encouraging preventive checkups can be counterproductive if the risk of being on the hook for problems discovered in the checkups is higher than the preventive benefit during the duration of the policy.

[uoaei]

The point seems to be more that "insurance" as a word betrays the original intention of the service while the current state of affairs demonstrates how much the concept has been bastardized.

Insurance is for those events where you don't expect a gruesome injury and need to insure, or hedge, against those one-offs. Preventative care isn't the same idea because you expect to get older and things to fail slowly. But barring any conditions or disorders, this isn't insurance against external sources of damage but just an action taken against inevitable consequences of having an organic body that tries to keep itself in a delicate and easily-broken balance for 50+ years.