Insurance as a tax on risky behavior makes sense. You could also just call it a tax with no insurance involved though. It's fine either way, as long as the goal is to take money from people doing something that endangers others and use the money to protect the other people from the danger (like with regular car insurance). If the goal is to protect the customer from themselves, it only works in a fucked up economy, but that still doesn't mean the insurance business itself has to be the fucked up part. It's basically organizing to have poor people help pay for outlier expenses they can collectively afford to help each other with, but not individually afford to help themselves with. We happen to have an economy where insurance businesses are corporations run by the same people who design the economy to make people poor, but hypothetically there's the idea of free market capitalism where someone could start an insurance business just to help poor people organize their financial stuff while having no connections to why they're poor in the first place.