Erica Kahn, now 33, had recently lost her job as a biomedical engineer when she traveled to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in last August, she told NBC News.

After Kahn lost her job, she declined to pay for her former employer’s insurance for $650 a month through COBRA, the federal continuation of health coverage law.

The unemployed Massachusetts woman figured she could roll the dice as a healthy woman in her early 30s or at worst, could hastily buy private health insurance in a pinch, Kahn said.

I mean…you’ve the right to do that, but the flip side is that if you decide you don’t want to do insurance, you need to pay for any medical care you get.

Insurers mitigate risk. You can’t just get a condition and then go out and buy insurance to pay for it — they’ll be structured to make that difficult, or they’d just be constantly losing money.

Kahn went online, bought a policy and then went to get rabies vaccinations and treatment in Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts, believing she was in the clear.

Then the bills started pouring in, asking for a total of $20,749, because her policy had a 30-day waiting period before she could receive treatments covered by the plan, she said.

And, yeah, there’s that structure.

Personally, I think that unless you’re truly in a position where you really don’t need risk mitigation, you probably want health insurance, since you could wind up with some kind of utterly catastrophic situation. Like, if you can reasonably cover any medical bill that comes up yourself, then yeah, it’s just taking on some unnecessary overhead. If I were Bill Gates, I wouldn’t get health insurance. But for most people, I’d at least get coverage for catastrophic events. Going with a high deductible is a more-reasonable way to reduce the amount of risk mitigation you’re buying.