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Someone needs to explain health insurance to me.

And not my wife, whose marital obligation in such things is to play the devil’s advocate and disagree with me.

I’ve kept tabs, and the two of us have agreed on matters of importance exactly three times in the 30 years we’ve been married — once when we said “I do,” and twice when neither of us could explain how we had such good children.

What I really need is someone to share my anger, light torches and storm the Bastille. OK, if not the actual Bastille then the place where those widget-brained insurance underwriters make their so-called rational decisions.

Here’s an example, and unfortunately not a hypothetical one: Having been insured by more than a handful of insurers over the past 10 years, I’ve practiced “preventive medicine,” which translates in insurance-speak to “Now we gotcha!”

Since my father had colon cancer (and lived to 92), it was recommended that I have a colonoscopy to make sure that a) I could live on Jell-o and chicken broth for a whole day without becoming homicidal and b) didn’t have any precancerous activity going on in the depths of my innards.

My first colonoscopy came back with a couple of noncancerous polyps. They were removed, no big whoop, but now I’m labeled “family and medical history” and have to come back in three years for more spelunking into my inner regions.

On the second go-round, I did the Jell-o/chicken broth routine, and this time everything was hunky-dory, so I’m pushed back to return in five years for another exam.

That brings us to August. The bowel doc finds two new noncancerous polyps and removes them. As a responsible consumer of preventive medicine, I’ve done my bit to live longer and, apparently, to endure a larger helping of absurdity.

In December, our current insurance expires, and we’ve been shopping for a new insurer. Because of my “family and medical history,” no insurer will touch me without excluding anything that has to do with my intestines. My wife and son, both of whom have allergies and asthma and do all the preventive/treatment things that rational people (with insurance) do, are running into similar problems.

One insurer will cover my son and exclude anything that has to do with asthma, including all medication. My wife’s situation is similar, just worse.

I don’t have the precise figures, but we’ll wind up paying around $950 a month to NOT COVER the things we need medically. And this, my friends, with a $5,000 deductible!

A rational person might argue that insurance underwriters work with mathematical probabilities and simply make decisions that are in the best interests of their employers. That, they say, is what any good business would do.

And that’s why I’d like to light a torch and storm the insurance Bastille: I’d be more insurable if I didn’t go to the doctor, didn’t know my family history and didn’t practice preventive medicine.

It’s a classic catch 22. Do the right thing now and pay for it later.

If I simply didn’t do any of those things, insurance companies would take me (with lower premiums and a lower deductible), and I could simply get colon cancer and dump the whole bill on them. I bet that would show them!

But I’ve done the responsible thing, and the result is that the insurance company is the big winner. I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me there’s something very wrong with that.

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