Richard Lynch, an awesome PHP community guy and former colleague needs our help

1) Larger risk pools are better. Let's say you have your ten closest family members and friends, and they're willing to spend an arbitrary amount to save your life. Despite that, a diagnosis like brain cancer or a severe heart attack with complications is likely to bankrupt all of them. Make it hundreds of millions of people, and the bumps are smoothed out to oblivion.

2) Lots of people are embedded in communities that have fewer resources available than other communities. You're damning them to die--or, in this case, die in a significantly less dignified way without proper palliative treatment--just because their friends and family happen to be poorer.

3) What about the people who don't have many family members or friends? Do we just want to condemn them to suffer, merely because they thrive with only a few friends instead of many?

Private insurance helps with these problems. Some people, however, aren't willing, knowledgeable, or rich enough to purchase health insurance. Even if you hold them in contempt and think that they deserve to die because of their lack of insurance, as a society we don't like that. So we can either (a) provide everyone with public health insurance/care or (b) require everyone to purchase insurance. Some countries go with (a), some with (b), most a mixture of the two.

It's best that whatever country we're in, we look at the countries that have had the best results in health outcomes and copy them as best we can in new local contexts.

That's awfully sad, albeit not as sad as the fact that it was successful.

>Aren't any insurance provider covering these kind of things?"

On paper, yes. In reality, no. I'm not aware of any sources of data on which, if any insurers are better in this regard. The insurers obviously have no reason to divulge this and the folks who experience are likely dead or dying.

>"If so, why anyone would take a insurance that doesn't?"

As the other comment points out, most people receive insurance through their employers, limiting their options. It's possible to self-insure, but prohibitively expensive for many people.

Even among those who are well-paid. The costs are high enough that it's quite common for married couples, particularly those who have or plan to have children, who could otherwise live on one income to maintain a one job "for the benefits".

Finally, there's an incredible amount of misinformation about how these things work in practice and about legislation like the Affordable Care Act aka "Obamacare" which aims to address some of the worst parts of it.

>"Sorry, but I cannot understand how a high skilled worker in a high income country has to beg for money because medical problems."

Medical care in general and cancer treatment in particular is atrociously expensive. Paying out of pocket you'd be looking at several thousand per month for drugs, thousands per day for hospitalization and tens of thousands for major surgery.

Even with insurance the co-pays and deductibles (amount the insured is required to pay) can range up to a significant percentage of those costs.

Unless you're fabulously wealthy, a terminal illness generally means living exactly as long as your insurance and/or the generosity of others allows.