> insurance is the only industry where they agree to pay for something (in this case, "medical care"), but then after service has been rendered can decide to pay less

That's not always the case. The reason I stopped writing mobile applications long ago was because the mobile carriers were doing exactly this, and not even providing enough paperwork for you to argue with them about it.

People like to lambast the Apple App Store for being greedy, but the fact of the matter is that people netted 3x as much off Apple that they did from the carriers. They are asking too much money now but their rates were absolutely defensible at the time. It's not a coincidence that we had a gold rush that started almost exactly when the App Store became a viable target.

One might ask what would happen if we joined the rest of the 1st World in providing medical care and marginalized private health insurance. Would it be a similar watershed moment?