Comment by aeontech

You don't need it until you need it, and needing it often comes in the form of a lightning strike from blue sky. The counterargument is that having everyone pay a higher amount makes it feasible to actually have this coverage available, when needed, without bankrupting the insurance companies, because the rare astronomically expensive care is covered by the premiums paid by the vast majority of people who are relatively healthy and are unlikely to need it.

Now whether the on-paper prices for medical care in this country actually have any relationship to objective reality is an entirely separate question of course. In general coming from an outside perspective, combining healthcare and for-profit motives in a single system seems particularly likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives, but, it's the system that exists, and it seems unlikely to change any time soon.