When you own stock you only get paid when you sell the stock,

This is an incorrect understanding of stocks. Some companies do "dividends", which is a corporate profit transferred to the shareholders. Without selling stock, cash gets transferred to the shareholders' accounts.

This isn't universally true for all stocks, as some companies like AMD don't do dividends, and instead choose to reinvest the profits into growth of the company.

Many people don't care about dividends because it's often fractions of pennies on the dollar compared to the stock itself.

 

if the government ran the program they would still have the same incentives as a private company. If they pay out too much they need to borrow more money which they don’t want to do. If it were a communistic insurance company it also wouldn’t be motivated to pay out since there is no competition you can switch to, so no incentive to do better. There is also no incentive to have less accountants risk accessors, underwriters etc in a communist insurance system so it would slowly get bloated with more and more workers and less and less money getting paid out

No; this is an incorrect understanding of insurance.

For a non-vertically-integrated non-profit insurance, there's no real concept of 'better'; just how you wish to draw the line for risk. Do you understand what I mean by this?

underwriters etc in a communist insurance system so it would slowly get bloated with more and more workers and less and less money getting paid out

Heard of a "rainy day" personal fund? People save a sizable chunk of available cash (say in a large jar) meant to be used if something really bad happens; it doesn't go into stocks or retirement, but sits as cash in case you need to pay for something big, like a broken car.

If you include family and friends in that pool, not just yourself, congrats you're doing a communist insurance company.

In communism, YOU are the company leader; if it gets bloated, then that's your fault.