To protect yourself and your family against the financial risk of illness or injury and to finance necessary preventive health care needs. If you are a billionaire you can disregard this advice. If you are a regular American then you disregard it at your own peril.
Health care is expensive. I had to answer this question recently for some people who had immigrated to the U.S.A., were rather young to early middle aged and who hadn't had occasion to use much health care in our country yet. So here are a few ball park figures I gave them from a report from 2012. The average cost of an appendectomy is around $13,300. The average cost of a day in the hospital is over $3400. A normal child birth runs around $8000 and a C-section birth can be in the $12,000 to $13,000 range. And this is just normal run of the mill life events most people will experience at some time.
My late cousin lost his 7-year battle with prostate cancer and while he participated in a lot of experimental programs as M.D. Anderson that were either free of heavily subsidized we still loosely estimated that his medical costs that he could track over that period were well in excess of $2 million. My niece delivered a premature child at 26 weeks and the child spent another 6+ months in neonatal intensive care, they've crossed the $1 million dollar threshold and the meter is still running as their child will probably require some level of treatment for the rest of his life.
Oh, and you need to have health insurance to protect yourself against the individual mandate tax penalty included in ObamaCare. Which in 2015 will be $325 or 2% of your income (whichever is greater) and that will steadily increase in following years.
Hopefully this will help answer your question as to why someone would need health insurance.
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Health care is expensive. I had to answer this question recently for some people who had immigrated to the U.S.A., were rather young to early middle aged and who hadn't had occasion to use much health care in our country yet. So here are a few ball park figures I gave them from a report from 2012. The average cost of an appendectomy is around $13,300. The average cost of a day in the hospital is over $3400. A normal child birth runs around $8000 and a C-section birth can be in the $12,000 to $13,000 range. And this is just normal run of the mill life events most people will experience at some time.
My late cousin lost his 7-year battle with prostate cancer and while he participated in a lot of experimental programs as M.D. Anderson that were either free of heavily subsidized we still loosely estimated that his medical costs that he could track over that period were well in excess of $2 million. My niece delivered a premature child at 26 weeks and the child spent another 6+ months in neonatal intensive care, they've crossed the $1 million dollar threshold and the meter is still running as their child will probably require some level of treatment for the rest of his life.
Oh, and you need to have health insurance to protect yourself against the individual mandate tax penalty included in ObamaCare. Which in 2015 will be $325 or 2% of your income (whichever is greater) and that will steadily increase in following years.
Hopefully this will help answer your question as to why someone would need health insurance.