Insurance and Other Fearsome Beasts: Understanding the Myths and Methods of Health Insurance

Join Tina Marsh Dalton for this inaugural salon in our Roots of Progress Fellows series. Insurance is vital to accessing modern medical care, but why is it so complex?  In this salon, Tina will examine how we got here: why insurance first emerged, its (true) core purpose, and how it has evolved.

We will travel across the globe and over time to unearth surprising origins of insurance as well as confront the multi-headed beast of modern insurance – maybe even try out some ideas to tame it. Joins us on this epic quest to understand and improve the most influential component of modern healthcare systems.

Questions we’ll explore:

• When did something like modern insurance first appear? What groups first created these arrangements?
• What are simple, yet surprising, ways the idea of insurance appears in other cultural contexts and across time?
• What is insurance’s core purpose and is modern insurance still accomplishing this role?
• What happens when society/policy tries to use insurance beyond its core purpose?
• What are the many confusing pieces of a modern health insurance plan and how are they used to influence our interactions with health care?

Recommended Reading:

Insurance: Why does it (really) exist? by Tina Marsh Dalton

Health Insurance Pricing: Battling the snake heads of Hydra by Tina Marsh Dalton

Health Insurance in Black Beauty? by Tina Marsh Dalton

How to Cure Healthcare by Milton Friedman

Dental Insurance Isn’t a Scam, but it’s also not Insurance by Emily Stewart at Vox