That money went into the care of others who got sick, administrative costs, and because everything is for profit, you helped pay for someone's vacation home. Eventually, if you get sick, the premiums of other people pay are used for your care. Insurance operates because not everyone needs to use it at the same time. If everyone needed to use the insurance at the same time, the insurance company would not be able to pay for care and would go bankrupt.

The same thing happened during the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Banks lent people money with variable interest rates to purchase homes. (These were predatory loans, and they were being given to people with questionable credit who otherwise would not be able to get a home loan.) The banks then turned all of those variable rate home loans into housing related securities, which let investors in those programs earn interest on buying a tiny slice of the mortgages. When banks raised the interest rates on the people with those home loans, suddenly people couldn't afford their mortgage payments and defaulted. Many of those variable rate loans were required to get mortgage insurance to protect the lender against the loan takers defaulting on the loan. Those mortgage insurance companies were flooded with claims. AIG, one such company, faced billions in losses from credit default swaps and its securities lending program, pushing the firm to the brink of bankruptcy.

Back to health insurance talk. As a consumer, the nice thing about medical insurance is it caps your costs due to a catastrophic event via something called a maximum out-of-pocket, (Max OOP.) Assuming you have a deductible, the money you spend to meet the deductible, and copays you pay after that count towards the Max OOP. When you hit the max OOP, you're covered in full, for the rest of the calendar year. I don't have a deductible; my max OOP is $6,350. If I spend $6,350 on co-payments, my co-payments stop until December 31, and it resets when it rolls over to the next calendar year. Without insurance, a catastrophic health event would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and would absolutely bankrupt me. $6,350 would also put me under financial strain, but it's something I could recover from financially, and probably wouldn't have to file bankruptcy over.