Health Insurance Is a Strange Way of Paying for Health Care

The tax treatment of employer sponsored health insurance does, or really the implicit penalty on an cash income, and you're therefore your right to make your own health care decisions. What that does is it encourages people to buy more insurance than they would have otherwise. And if you are naturally risk averse, you end up buying more health insurance than before. For some people, it makes sense to buy first dollar coverage where you're not paying for anything out of pocket.