Insurance is fraud. If it weren’t, how could an industry make bets against the certainties of human life—-illness, accidents and death—-and profit so much from them?

In my thirties, I wanted to protect a wife and young children and decided that, with self-discipline, I could buy the simplest and cheapest term insurance at each stage of life, reducing it as I went along, while putting the difference in premiums into untouchable accounts to earn compound interest for my family rather than strangers.

That oversimplification, granted, leaves out much that is inescapable in human nature for most people, but the principle involved keeps recurring to me during the Obamacare crisis as Americans discover the simplicity that a single-payer system could have provided while foreclosing much of the insurer greed and dishonesty plaguing the ACA now.

Surprises about the rollout are not the glitches and evasions but the fact that it works at all at state levels in some places. Frankenstein monsters are clunky in real life.

Now heavy thinkers in the GOP are worried.

MORE.