No, it is insurance.
You see insurance as a mandatory service against risk. Well, you can't guarantee the price level of hedging against risk.
The reason why health insurance is so expensive in the US, is that people buy it as a means of health pre-pay, not as actual insurance against major medical. Most health consumers would never pay for the insurance they get if it came out of their own pocket, but because it is paid for by their employer (due to government tax interventions) they try to exploit the insurance (which is now a form of wage compensation) to cover every thing under the sun.
This leads to more expensive insurance, and it also leads to a lack of cost accountability by medical providers, since they aren't dealing with the patient as customer, but the patient's agent (insurance co), which is paid for by the patient's employer, who is incentivized by the patient's government tax policy.
These levels of abstraction distort the natural market incentives for prices to fall and service levels to increase.
