What is “alternative healthcare”? The broadest definition seems to include preventative health measures and anything that doesn’t involve either pharmaceuticals or surgery. Remember that for later in the article.

More specifically, alternative healthcare could include nutritional coaching, chiropractic care, acupuncture, massage, reiki, homeopathy, aromatherapy, halotherapy, biofeedback, naturopathy, supplements, reflexology, etc. Or, if you’re into the whole “holistic” approach, maybe you undergo a therapy program that includes any combination of all of those things.

I recently came across an article from The Bayside Journal that really brought a lot of what I do into a bigger perspective. In essence, the argument is this: alternative healthcare is, in so many ways, objectively better than the mainstream approach to health. It’s safer (check out the death-by-medicine stats in America). It costs less. It’s better at preventing health conditions. It’s more prepared to address a person’s mental state and it’s more prepared to address a person’s spiritual needs–both things conventional medicine tends to scoff at (unless a psychiatrist has a chance to prescribe you some brain drugs… of course).

All that being said, why don’t people use alternative medicine more often–or even exclusively? There are a lot of reasons. Maybe they don’t know they have all of these options. Maybe they’re under the impression that if health information or recommendations don’t come from an MD, it must be snake oil, woo-woo nonsense. Who knows? But according to The Bayside Journal, the number one reason is that their health insurance doesn’t cover it–which totally makes sense. Money is always a big thing in healthcare in America.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Being a somewhat entrepreneurial-leaning person, I thought… “Maybe I could start an alternative medicine health insurance!”

But then it occurred to me, it would never work. Let me explain why and in doing so, illustrate why health insurance as a concept just doesn’t do us all that much good.

So, all types of insurance operate in the same way so that both insurance companies are profitable AND they have the funds to actually do what they promise to do when the time comes.

It’s a lopsided system. Think about how you pay, let’s say, $300 a month for your health insurance for the whole year. That’s $3,600 over the course of the year. But you only got a little case of strep throat once throughout the whole year that required you to go to your general practitioners office, then to the pharmacy for a round of antibiotics. Of course the GP and the pharmacy billed your insurance company to the tune of (and I’m just making this up to make a point) $250. Over the course of the year, that’s $3,250 in profit your insurance company made JUST OFF OF YOU.

Obviously, it’s not that simple. There are plenty of sick people whose healthcare costs exceed (even sometimes greatly exceed) the amount they pay into the system. The insurance company uses the extra $3,250 you paid (and many other people) to cover the cost of the sick people. For what it is, it works quite well. And these companies still rake in huge profits.

But here’s the problem–and why health insurance wouldn’t work for alternative healthcare.

The current health insurance model only works because it’s reactive. It only pays out when something bad happens to you–be it a car accident or cancer. For the vast majority of your life, nothing too bad happens to you. You’re just going about your life. But you still pay and that’s how insurance companies make money.

Even though alternative healthcare tends to be cheaper than conventional medicine, it’s more of a “pay ahead” rather than “pay behind” system. You would pay your chiropractor a few hundred a month to keep your spine maintained, even if it’s not in a state of emergency. You would pay your massage therapist $100 a month to manage stress. You would spend a couple hundred a month on supplements to make sure your micronutrient levels are in good shape. When you add it all up, it might be somewhere around exactly what you pay for health insurance. The problem is, everybody would do the same thing you did, spending all of their “alternative health insurance” budget at the same rate and there would be none left over for the insurance company to profit from. It negates the purpose.

This, for me, really helps to illustrate how health insurance is kind of useless. With the exception of accidents and injury and genetic disorders, basically everything you use your health insurance for wouldn’t even happen if you had a rigorous “alternative” medicine routine.