>fundamentally it's leveraging the wealth of a few people so they can extract some wealth from many more

The insurance company isn't paying you out of the coffers of their wealthy owners. They're paying you out of the coffers from you and all your fellow insurance buyers' premiums. The primary transfering of money is from the little guy--- to the little guy. Any massive profits come from skimming a tiny bit of that at a very large scale. And competition pretty much dictates that that won't be predatory.

What I mean is that some group of people earns dividends from the profit of the insurance company (stockholders or private owners), the insurance company earns profit by charging each little guy more than they are expected to cost.

When I say 'inherently predatory', I don't mean that every insurance company is doing the equivalent of loan sharking, I mean that the concept of mandatory participation in a system that then also makes its own determination of how much wealth is reasonable to take from you in exchange for its service seems fundamentally immoral.

You know, when I write it like that, this applies to life in basically any situation --

* fully-capitalist (have to work, a market you have no control over determines your value)

* fully-communist (have to work, a government you have no control over determines your value)

* completely anarchist (have to work, the conditions of the world around you determine how much work you need to do to stay alive)

So I think what I'm actually saying might just be 'life isn't fair' which is kinda banal.

You can think of an insurer as someone who provides a service of pooling resources together to help those who got unlucky. That service is worth something and is not necessarily predatory.

I think the idea of that service being all three of mandatory, not owned by its participants, and profit-driven is what causes it to feel inherently predatory -- that there exist companies which take on risk on behalf of entities who cannot take on that risk (and therefore must participate), and then profit by charging those entities more than they are expected to cost and using the pool of wealth created as investment funds for which only owners of that company derive benefit.

The service is obviously not worthless--some entity has to assess risk, coordinate, and administrate--but it is predicated on terms that make it (I would assert) immoral to transfer more than is necessary from those that participate in the service to those that own the service.