my experience wrote:
Insurance is not a "big scam." It is a service available to people who want to buy it. If you consider yourself having been "scammed" into buying an insurance policy before, that's on you. Nobody is pointing a gun at your head and making you buy insurance; in most cases it's at your discretion, except when it's mandated by law (like auto liability insurance) or somebody you want to do business with insists on it (your mortgage company insists on fire insurance; a company hiring you insists on errors and omissions and other forms of professional coverage).
When it's your choice to make, you should buy insurance to cover losses you can't (or prefer not to) afford, and not bother with insurance for losses you might find irritating but won't break the bank. In our case, we have not bothered with auto collision or comprehensive insurance in many years because we usually drive used cars we could replace with cash on hand if we had to. But home insurance has come in handy in offsetting major losses more times than I would have liked. In about 30 years of owning our own home, we have had claims for basement flooding (burst pipe), a major storm that killed power for ten days, two burglaries, three stolen bikes and a lawsuit for an incident that happened during a run. I've probably paid ~ $30-40k over ~ 30 years in home insurance. The lawsuit on its own had a chance of costing much, much more than that (I don't actually know the settlement amount, they wouldn't tell me).
The insurance industry gets a bad rap, sometimes justifiably, but my experience has been mostly positive. And when major disasters strike, those companies by and large step up pretty hard.
No poster has stated opportunity cost. Hurricanes, wild fires, blah, blah blah. How many lose their homes to the previously stated? The vast majority would do better with a limited amount of health insurance and wisely investing the difference. They are not donating their time at insurance companies. Insurance in the aggregate is a racket.