> In other words, I'm being asked to buy a product, and the cheapest form of it is to basically pay almost $15k in a year to hedge against someone getting cancer or whatever, and actively incentivizes me to not use it[0]

You are not paying $15k to hedge against someone in your family getting cancer in a calendar year.

You are paying $15k to pay for old and sick people’s routine healthcare, due to the ACA’s requirement that the highest premium to be at most 3x the lowest premium, and the requirement that premiums be only a function of age and tobacco use (i.e. no underwriting for health risks by factoring in pre existing conditions).

So an ACA compliant health plan’s premiums are far more comparable to a tax than an insurance premium since they are explicitly a wealth transfer mechanism from young and healthy to old and sick.

New York state takes this wealth transfer even further and mandates that age not be used at all to price premiums. I think Massachusetts only allows an age rating factor of 2.