If Public Health Insurance Keeps Improving and Insurance Keeps Getting Cheaper, Is Online Mutual Aid Still Needed?

Someone asked me: if one day public health insurance keeps improving and commercial insurance drives prices very low, is there still any need for online mutual aid to exist?

I think there still is. It is just that the reason for online mutual aid to exist cannot forever rest on the words “it is cheaper.”

If online mutual aid is understood merely as a kind of low-cost protection, then of course its advantage will shrink as public health insurance coverage becomes fuller and commercial insurance cheaper. But what is truly worth exploring about online mutual aid is that it can be a form of social cooperation entirely different from traditional protection.

The core of insurance is a contract: I pay a premium, and the insurer bears responsibility under the contract.

Online mutual aid has something different layered on top — participation.

A member is not merely someone who pays in and waits for protection; they can see whom the mutual-aid funds helped, can understand why a case was approved or refused, can take part in visits, oversight, adjudication and community governance, and can even express their views on public rules.

And so a “protection expense” that was once cold and impersonal can become a mutual-aid relationship that can be seen, joined and felt.

This is precisely the direction in which online mutual aid is worth further innovating: greater openness and transparency, a stronger sense of participation, more developed member self-governance, more real stories of mutual aid, and clearer flows of funds.

In the future, judging whether a mutual-aid platform is any good should not rest on a single question, “how much per month?”, but should also ask: do members feel involved? Can everyone understand the rules? Is the mutual-aid process transparent enough? Do ordinary members have channels to monitor and voice opinions? After helping someone, can a person truly feel their own value?

Of course, these advantages do not arise automatically.

If online mutual aid merely deducts money from a group of accounts and transfers it to another person, with users neither knowing what happened nor feeling any involvement, then in the end it can only compete with commercial insurance on price. And in terms of financial strength, actuarial capability and service systems, mutual-aid platforms are not suited to head-on competition with established insurers.

So the competitiveness that online mutual aid truly needs to build in the future is not “a bit cheaper than insurance,” but making the words “mutual aid” real.

Let protection be not only a contract but a visible connection between people; let members be not only payers and beneficiaries but participants, overseers and co-builders.

Public health insurance becoming more complete is social progress; commercial insurance becoming cheaper is good too. Online mutual aid has no need to fight with them over who replaces whom.

A mature society can perfectly well have public health insurance, social assistance, charity, commercial insurance and grassroots mutual aid all at the same time.

What online mutual aid truly needs to think about is not how to prove it cannot be replaced by others, but how to create a value that others have no need to replace.

That is the question online mutual aid really needs to answer in its next stage.