Insurance

The flood insurance bill came this week. It was a bunch, which my industrious wife managed to lower to a slightly smaller bunch by taking a much higher deductible. Insurance is one of the underdespised banes of modern life. Sit down when you have a little time on your hands and total up all you pay in insurance -- home, car, health. It will easily run up to a fifth or more of your total income. I wonder if people in, say, Spain, spend as much on insurance as do we. If you kick, they always say how much you'll love it when you need it, but in my experience when you do need it, you have to struggle to get the insurance company to pay you what you've been paying for all that time. I read that there is a vaccination against shingles and that anyone who'd had chicken pox likely had a virus present that could erupt in shingles. I've known two people who'd suffered attacks of shingles, and they found it pretty miserable. So, I asked at the doc's office about the shingles shot. They told me that it cost two or three hundred bucks and insurance wouldn't cover it.