Well I certainly have no special authority in the matter, but maybe Kahnemann has? He got a Nobel after all. To be true he didn't say insurance was a scam, he equated it to lottery in the fact that it plays on the difficulty to evaluate rare events probability, and also the psychological reward in buying a lottery ticket (temporary dreams of massive wealth, e.g. how many Ferrari will I buy...) or insurance (peace of mind).
I have friends in the insurance business and I think it is a very honorable profession in most of the cases but you can't wipe out 1) the door to door insurance salesman scamming fragile old people, 2) the possibility that, much like finance, the whole insurance profession is based on wrong equations that makes it apparently robust but inherently fragile (in the sense of Nassim Taleb).
I have friends in the insurance business and I think it is a very honorable profession in most of the cases but you can't wipe out 1) the door to door insurance salesman scamming fragile old people, 2) the possibility that, much like finance, the whole insurance profession is based on wrong equations that makes it apparently robust but inherently fragile (in the sense of Nassim Taleb).