[savanaly]

>fundamentally it's leveraging the wealth of a few people so they can extract some wealth from many more

The insurance company isn't paying you out of the coffers of their wealthy owners. They're paying you out of the coffers from you and all your fellow insurance buyers' premiums. The primary transfering of money is from the little guy--- to the little guy. Any massive profits come from skimming a tiny bit of that at a very large scale. And competition pretty much dictates that that won't be predatory.

[bskrobisz]

What I mean is that some group of people earns dividends from the profit of the insurance company (stockholders or private owners), the insurance company earns profit by charging each little guy more than they are expected to cost.

When I say 'inherently predatory', I don't mean that every insurance company is doing the equivalent of loan sharking, I mean that the concept of mandatory participation in a system that then also makes its own determination of how much wealth is reasonable to take from you in exchange for its service seems fundamentally immoral.

You know, when I write it like that, this applies to life in basically any situation --

* fully-capitalist (have to work, a market you have no control over determines your value)

* fully-communist (have to work, a government you have no control over determines your value)

* completely anarchist (have to work, the conditions of the world around you determine how much work you need to do to stay alive)

So I think what I'm actually saying might just be 'life isn't fair' which is kinda banal.