The average citizen of the United States pays a whole lot of insurance premiums during their lifetime. In fact, the numbers are quite staggering and somewhat unbelievable. If you were to take all the money you spend on insurance premiums and invest in the stock market with an average growth rate 6.6% per year, you would retire a very wealthy individual.

That’s just a fact of the time value of money. Still, if you are giving that money to insurance companies, and they are investing the money and get an even a higher rate of return than 6.6 percent per year, and of course, you are feeding their wealth machine instead of your own.

Think about this for a moment, very few of our ancestors if we go back three generations had insurance at all. They had to be more careful to prevent risks in their lives, but they had no insurance to back them up or bail them out if they screwed up. If they had a compound fracture they had to go to the local doctor and pay him real money, cash to fix it, and that money would have come out of their farm budget.

If they did something stupid and ended up burning down their wooden house there was no insurance to fix it, the family had to band together and rebuild the home, hopefully with the help of neighbors.

Today, because people borrow so much money, and because insurance is actually required by the government to drive a car, to run a business, or to do just about anything; along with the fact that banks don’t like risks when they loan money, so citizens are required to buy all types of insurance, for all types of potential eventualities.

Still, if the insured put all that money in their own accounts, and allowed that money to grow they would have to borrow money for many of the things they borrow to buy in the first place, and they would have enough money to pay for any problems that were created from any mistakes they made.

Please think about this philosophical issue as President Obama declares a national health care insurance program.