So let's go back to why health insurance is flawed. Normal healthy individuals may make 3 (annual plus 2 cold/flu) trips to the doctor in a year. I pay 218$ per month for insurance through my employer (not counting the portion they pay). This means that I am effectively paying 872$ per trip to my doctor... ok... lets let that sink in... even if you count a nurse, doctor and receptionist out front splitting it and them only seeing 3 patients per hour (rough cases might take that long) we are still talking they would be making 1.74 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR EACH! Now if you have any friends that are medical professionals I bet you know that there are VERY few that are making that much per year... especially receptionists :)
Now the argument is that "well this money helps balance out all the catastrophic claims"... fine then why are we using insurance for non-catastrophic claims?
Because catastrophic and non-catastrophic work differently for health than anything else. If I crash my car then yep, that's $20K. Catastrophic. However, I have choices. I can take the $20K and get a cheaper but equivalent used car, I can just not get a car at all and bank it, etc.
Health can be like that. Yeah, I'll go in for my 'maintenance' visits for physicals and my small problems like colds, infections, etc. I've got no problem with paying direct for that - I'm a proponent of HSAs. And then maybe I break my leg, oops, that's catastrophic, but it will heal. So insurance picks that one up and in a few months I'm good as new. But I don't really have the option not to fix my leg. It's rather necessary. So that comparison is broken - health insurance isn't car insurance.
But if I have AIDS, or Crohn's disease, how do you classify that? If you had a car that required thousands of dollars of repairs monthly, you'd just sell it for what you could and get a new one, or use a lemon law, or sue the bad repair man who screwed it up like that and get a new one. But of course, you can't get a new body.
So what do you do? You keep it going. If it gets really expensive, then you have to ask is it worth it? It's a big question, especially with human life.
So the question isn't catastrophic vs. maintenance because you can't just replace hardware (ie, your body) and get new. Well, not yet anyhow. It's the expensive maintenance that we have to pay for (because otherwise, someone will die) that's the problem.
Other insurances don't handle that. Flood insurance in the midwest? They got tired of reimbursing people who kept building on flood plains, so the state stepped in, bought the property and razed everything on it. That's the closest analogue I can think of and if we worked the same way with health insurance we'd just buy out the rest of the person's life and kill them. Dunno about that one.