Here's a tangent from outside the US, where health insurance is "great". Overall, it's true that it's not insane as in the US, but scratch below the surface and all insurances have a bottom line. A friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer, it looked especially bad, but she's through chemo and it looks promising now. Recently the health insurance told her since it's actually hopeless they want to stop paying her medical leave money, they want to make her "retired" because she's not coming back to work anyway so the pension system should take over. She was a freelancer most of her life, so didn't pay that much into it, and will drop from 1500 to 700 euros of monthly income. There are things you can do, appeal, apply for state aid etc but try to do that when you are recovering from cancer, chemo, have three kids, and your health insurance is telling you to give up it's hopeless.<p>Now make the insurance a for-profit business trying to maximize shareholder value and you get what you get.