This chapter seeks to explain why most people prefer to have a health insurance plan. Two types of uncertainty give rise to the demand for financial protection: people do not know if they will ever come to need healthcare, and they do not know the full financial implications of illness. Health insurance would take away—or at least reduce—such financial uncertainties associated with future illnesses. A model is presented to show the so-called welfare gain from health insurance. This is followed by an investigation into the potential efficiency losses of health insurance, due to excess demand for services. In the last section, a different efficiency problem is discussed: when people have an incentive to signal ‘false risks’, this can lead to there being no market for insurance contracts which reflect ‘true risks’.