Health, health care, and health insurance are all three different things

From Mammogram Study Exposes Medical Naiveté by Walter Russell Mead, an insight I have not seen put so succinctly elsewhere.

The fundamental truth emerging from much recent work on the US health care system is that health, health care, and health insurance are all three different things. They bear important relationships, of course. But those connections are complex and understudied. We do know that neither health care nor health insurance as we currently use them always improve health. We also know that health is a multifaceted phenomenon that has as much to do with environmental factors or your relationships to other people as to the treatment you receive. But there’s a lot we still don’t know, and that makes policies based on the folk notion of a direct progression from health insurance to health care to health outcomes problematic.