After the costs of shelter, what do you think Americans spend the most on?
The Answer: Insurance.
Shelter gets the top spot as we spend about $12 Trillion a
year on mortgages and rent. Then in second place Insurance at roughly $8.5 Trillion. More than half of the insurance costs are for health care of course and then things like car insurance, home insurance, business insurance, life insurance and disability insurance all beef up the number. To put this in perspective we only spend $2.6 Trillion on food and water, you know the things we actually need to stay alive.
To put it bluntly, the reason we spend so much on insurance is because we are fearful of the future, do not trust in our fellow man, and have no faith in our Lord and God. Insurance companies see a never-ending revenue generator in our fear, and they capitalize on it big time. Now of course I am no staunch opponent of the idea of insurance. I personally hold a life insurance policy and a home and auto bundle; it helps that I must by law have the minimum coverage in
home and auto (boy is that a topic for another day).
I just wanted to point these numbers out to the C3 readers so that you can wrap your head around this issue that was born from good intent. Taking care of others when tragedy strikes is something we should all encourage, but the costs are heavily inflated and will continue on that trajectory for the foreseeable future.
Is there anything we can do to fix the problem? At the individual level, not really. Sure, we could join those health share ministries I keep talking about to drive down the predatory inflation caused by insurance companies, but even the health share ministries have their flaws. We could also start other ministries based on the health share model for other types of insurance. this is actually something I wanted
to do for a while, but it takes significant funding to get off the ground...so if you are interested and have deep pockets, hit me up...JK...Not really.
Of course, there is one thing we can do that ties a bunch of little things together, namely have Faith. If we have faith, we gain wisdom, if we have wisdom we become content, a content person is less fearful, when fear is minimized, we make better
decisions, better decisions lead to a flourishing life, a flourishing life can lead to a flourishing community, a flourishing community practices charity, a community practicing charity has less of a need for "insurances."
Perhaps we need to have home and auto insurance because of laws in place, that is fine. Maybe we can fight those at a later date or figure out a way to drive down costs.
Perhaps we all go the health share ministry route and drive collectively cut down health care costs by half. Perhaps we all decide to rely on our families and communities instead of insurance companies when it comes to life insurance or disability insurance or general liability insurance. Perhaps if we actually tried to practice the gift economy of our Lord Jesus Christ then we might be able to work our way out of the financial mess we currently find ourselves in.
Again, nothing against insurance as a concept, but just wanted to air out my grievances and thoughts on the subject.
FYI no rant next week. Merry Christmas and God Bless!
