The problem is insurance companies and the gordian knot of legislation they've erected to block wise reform. You can't have real reform that includes them.
Boredom is hardly an argument for what is a large part of the problem. The history of contemporary insurance dates to the catholic church and the prohibition of usury. To get around the ban on lending money at interest, loans could be insured.
Default risk was priced and risk was conserved!
Fast-forward to the present day, the insurance concept was applied to healthcare as a way to smooth out one's healthcare costs over a lifetime and eliminate tail-risk to the individual. Since the 1930s, the insurance industry has evolved into a system to avoid paying for your healthcare costs. First, the growing expenses were thrown onto the employer (think auto manufacturers) and when the employers can't support the cost, onto the healthy by passing cost increases on to employees through increased premiums.
The fact is that if you consume something, you or someone(s) else will have to fund your consumption. The second law of thermodynamics applies to healthcare as well. There is no free lunch here either.
Insurance companies end up as an additional layer of administration expense. In the case of financialization of health care, the administration is extraordinarily expensive!
A contractum trinius was a set of contracts devised by European bankers and merchants in the Middle Ages as a method of circumventing canon law edicts prohibiting usury. At the time, most Christian nations heavily incorporated scripture into their laws, and as such it was illegal for any person to charge interest on a loan of money.
To get around this, a set of three separate contracts were presented to someone seeking a loan: an investment, a sale of profit and an insurance contract. Each of these contracts were permissible under Church law, but together replicated the effect of an interest-bearing loan.
The way this procedure worked was as follows: The lender would invest a sum equal to the amount of financing required by the borrower for one year. The lender would then purchase insurance for the investment from the borrower, and finally sell to the borrower the right to any profit made over a pre-arranged percentage of the investment. This system replicated the effects of a loan with any interest rate agreed between the two, yet provided protection to the lender against default, while the borrower remained under the protection of the law when it came to collection of the money by threats or force (loan sharking).
Vix Pervenit: On Usury and Other Dishonest Profit was an encyclical, promulgated by Pope Benedict XIV on November 1, 1745, which condemned the practice of charging interest on loans as usury.
Quite astonishing that in your search for the history of insurance, you managed to look up "Contractum_trinius" and "Vix_Pervenit" on Wikipedia, and yet failed to look up "Insurance" and look in the History section.
Insurance pre-dates Christianity by a considerable margin.
Perhaps it's possible I didn't google "history of insurance." Thorough reader you are, McWiki!
"history of contemporary insurance"
Merchant insurance was to protect against real property losses. Contemporary insurance is designed to allocate financial losses for financial products (non-real).
Anything that allows us to treat the insurance companies as a relatively homogenous, interchangeable set of entities reduces their power to impede progress. This is true whether you believe that they impede progress intentionally (i.e., are malicious actors), or just incidentally.