What Is the Most Significant Difference Between Online Mutual Aid and Commercial Insurance?

I believe the most significant difference lies in how the protection funds are managed.

Commercial insurers collect protection funds and manage them within their own companies. Because of the nature of insurance, this pool of funds becomes enormous.

Online mutual aid, by contrast, lets people manage the protection funds themselves and pay only when something happens, so the funds that online mutual aid can command are extremely small.

An insurance company with one million critical-illness insurance customers may manage well over one billion yuan in protection funds on a daily basis.

A mutual aid platform with one million critical-illness mutual aid users manages between zero and ten million yuan of users' funds on a daily basis.

What a gap that is—which is why I consider this the most significant difference.

So mutual aid must never be equated with insurance.

To emphasize: zero-yuan enrollment with post-event cost-sharing was pioneered by KangAi Commune in China. Precisely because many people thought it was impossible and unreliable, mutual aid was extremely difficult at the beginning.