> Hard to ‘refrain’ from buying health insurance in the middle of cancer treatment eh?
The thing you're insuring against in this case is a cancer diagnosis. If you're insured when that happens, the insurance company should now be on the hook for your lifetime worth of cancer treatment regardless of whether you pay them any more premiums. That isn't how we implement it, the existing regulations don't work like that, but that's how it would work if what you were buying was actually insurance. The insurer eats the cost at the point when the unknown risk becomes known.
> Or ‘refrain’ from buying house insurance because someone tripped in your house and is suing you for $1M worth of damages
You don't have to buy liability insurance if you own your house. Of course, then if your negligence injures someone they're going to get the house instead of the insurance company's money, but that's up to you. And can be avoided in either event by not giving people valid legal claims against you.
Notice that a single claim is generally not enough to make insurance unaffordable, and multiple large valid claims is generally a sign that you're doing something wrong.
> or you discovered your house was built in a high risk fire zone.
It's not the insurance company's fault that you bought a house without checking what it would cost to insure. The cost of insuring houses there is supposed to be high, to deter people from building them there.
> Or ‘refrain’ from buying vehicle insurance after an accident because the state will not let you drive without valid insurance.
So you take the bus or move to a walkable neighborhood. What's your alternative, that someone can total two new cars every week and still get insurance for the same rates as anyone else?
> Because for normal humans, there is no difference between ‘insurance won’t be issued’ and premiums shooting up from $100/mo to $90k/mo.
But why should an insurance company be required to insure you at all? "Known arsonists can't get/afford fire insurance" is fine. "People who get into a major car accident every week can't get/afford car insurance" is fine.
> especially when the policy renewal period is in the middle of whatever is going on.
That's not how insurance works. You buy insurance, then something happens, then you file a claim. They can't retroactively raise your premiums, they can only raise the future ones because there is now evidence that your risk is higher, and then you get to decide if continuing to carry insurance is worth it, and you still get the money from the claim that happened while you were insured. Then you can either choose to pay the higher rates, go uninsured going forward or stop doing the thing you need insurance coverage for.
> At least ‘pre existing conditions’ aren’t automatically a death sentence when trying to switch insurance anymore eh?
This has a similar effect to putting the full lifetime cost on the insurance company you had when you got diagnosed, except that you can then change insurance companies. Which is weird and has perverse incentives, like there is no reason to carry good insurance against long-term cancer treatment until after you find out you have cancer. Which makes the good insurance much more expensive because buyers would self-select and only people who know they have cancer would buy it.
Then we try to avoid that by tying health insurance to employment which makes it harder for people to switch when they get a diagnosis, and that in turn has a ton of other negative effects because now there is much less competitive pressure in the health insurance market.
Regulators seem to really suck at thinking through the consequences of what they're doing. Or they don't and someone is getting paid to do it this way on purpose.