For most products, you can assume you’ll get what you pay for. If you grab a six-pack out of the fridge, bring it to the cashier, and hand over the money, you get your beer. You don’t pretend that the liquor store did you some favor. You got poorer, the store got richer — and in return, you got something. This is commerce, not charity.

And yet there is one industry that is not held to this universal concept of transactions: private health insurance.

In America, a system of denied claims, wait times, paperwork, and bureaucratic red tape has worn us down and made us now presume that we won’t necessarily get the health care coverage that we buy. Indeed, just look at data from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces: customers pay big money to purchase health insurance policies, but when they go to actually use the insurance product they bought, almost one in five in-network claims are denied — and we accept this as just a normal part of life in the world’s richest nation.