Actually, throughout history (at least 500 years in the UK, since the end of the guild system) people have paid what was essentially a premium in order to access medical care at the point of need - effectively insurance, if not always named as such.

Most of these organisations were mutuals, eg, member owned, and would have pre-existing relationships with doctors etc that would control costs.

In this way, there were no perverse incentives - people had "insurance", and they wanted that money to cover as many eventualities as possible. The bigger the pot of money, the more resilient the community.

So actually, health insurance has a long legacy. The problem, I would suggest, is shareholders who are not the principal beneficiaries of the service.

FWIW, in the UK we found that a system of mutuals and municipally owned hospitals was sufficiently imperfect that we created the NHS anyway. Probably best to skip to single-payer in the US, imo.

Not really though. Not in the way it does today. Medicine up to 1900 was largely ineffective. And most of what we consider modern medicine has its roots in the 1940s. Which coincidentally is about the same time employer provided health insurance started becoming common.

Many procedures that are common between today and circa 1960s have grown exponentially in cost. It was about this time that public insurance became a thing, and private insurance approximately the same time, in terms of actual usage. The median cost to individuals has gone up significantly since any insurance was mandated.