experience eventually will.

I remember 4 or 5 years ago, when my son first went to graduate school, he decided to take the health insurance plan, but opted out of the extra cost for the dental. It was a pretty minimal extra cost, but he was living on a teaching assistant's stipend, and every penny counted.

And then, barely two months later, he called the day after we'd all gone out to dinner with a visiting relative. He'd broken a tooth at dinner, he said, and wondered if we could get him an emergency appointment with our dentist. How could you have broken your tooth, we asked him, knowing that, as a vegetarian, he'd ordered only the roasted squash soup. It had pumpkin seeds in it, and he'd cracked the tooth on one.

It was an $1,800 crown needed. If he'd had the insurance it would have paid $1,500 of that. As it stood, we had to front him the money. Needless to say, next enrollment period he got the dental insurance!

You just never know what is going to happen, kids. You can be the healthiest and fittest young person on earth, and a chunk of ice can come crashing down on you from a building; or a driver can knock you off your bicycle; or you can eat some soup and need an expensive crown.