Being Taught by a Tree

Yesterday afternoon, my neighbor got to work chainsawing a fallen tree from the storm into logs and then pulverizing the smaller branches in a mulcher that he bought in the morning at Lowe's.

Instead of paying the $ 500 deductible from his home insurance and then paying someone else to do the job, he just decided to do the work himself and use that same $ 500 to buy the mulcher. He's a self-reliant person and does not expect others to take care of his own problems, a characteristic in decline these days of victimization.

Hmm...there is a lesson here. Insurance should only exist for those devastating occurrences that ruin health and home. Catastrophic events that have life-altering consequences. Otherwise, pay your own way. It would put market discipline back into the system. Either we have a free market or we don't. A half-public, half-private system will never work over the long-term. Insurance companies don't want a free market either. Imagine the taking out all of the middle-men/women who do the investigation, processing and disbursement of relatively minor claims--a big piece of the insurance pie. More importantly, we take out the systemic profiteering of investors from a fundamentally flawed insurance industry out of control.

We have must cut out the third party all you can-eat dessert tray before our whole society goes into cardiac arrest. Hard choices need to be made and either we do it now or die. We have the answers, what we lack is the will.