Lee Da Silva’s Insurance Blog

With the economy being what it is today, many people are concerned with the expense of life insurance. Is it necessary to have health insurance? Those seem appropriate questions to ask especially for young people. After all, if you’re only in your 20s, you aren’t always thinking about the future and the implications from not having insurance.

When you’re young, it seems that you view the cost of life insurance and health insurance as “rip offs,” a way for insurance companies to take your money and give you nothing in return. It’s only when you begin to approach middle age or have children that the reality sets in. You need life insurance to take care of your family when you die, and you need health insurance to take care of them while you are still around. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a choice in how much you pay in premiums.

When it comes to life insurance, it’s easy to cut the premiums by taking out a term life insurance policy instead of whole life. One can do something similar with health insurance by raising the deductibles, but the problem there is that unlike term life insurance, when you raise deductibles on health insurance, you also run the risk of lowering the basic coverage as well. In addition, some of the major health insurance carriers do not offer an option of lowering premiums by increase deductibles, especially if it is an employer-sponsored policy.

In an economy where both life insurance and health insurance are necessary commodities, one would think that the insurance industry would make the effort to take measures to reduce premiums. Unfortunately, that is not happening so it leaves people with having to make a choice between buying insurance and taking care of other expenses that may be more important such as food, clothing, rent or mortgage, and electricity. As important as insurance is, adults should not have to make the choice between paying insurance and paying rent.

Sadly, those who are forced to make the choice not to carry life insurance because of cost factors run the risk of leaving their family unprotected. For a young family, that can mean that the surviving spouse has no money for burial expense or for taking care of the children with the sudden loss of income. If the surviving spouse is the mother, that leaves her with having to be sole provider with no means of support other than social security benefits for the children.

While still in mourning for her husband, she has to worry about how she is going to feed, clothe, and educate her children, something that leads many to forego the mourning process in order to find a new partner for financial reasons.

In spite of its cost, insurance is a necessary part of life, one that has severe consequences if it is neglected. It is important for everyone to have the ability to meet their obligations and have both life insurance and health insurance for themselves and their families. It’s essential that we find a way to return to the time when everyone considered both life and health insurance as an essential part of their budget.