Last week, a visitor to our web site submitted the following question (we’re taking questions now—ask yours here):

If a tree in my yard falls on neighbor’s roof, does my insurance pay for the damage? What if a tree is ready to fall down on my house—will my insurance company pay to remove the tree?

It’s a good question, and I suspect that it’s one that many homeowners have, and like most questions involving insurance, there are more shades of grey than appears at first blush. Read the answer here.

But the second question—will my insurer pay to have a weak tree removed—points to a very common misconception about insurance in general, and this misunderstanding centers around this seemingly straightforward question: What is insurance for?

While insurance has changed over the years, it still retains its original purpose: to insulate people from the destructive and costly whims of man and nature.

Actually, the addition of “man” (aka Homo litigious) to the mix is relatively new. Most of the big property-casualty insurers (the ones insuring your homes and cars) started out providing insurance to Midwestern farmers, who were (and still are) victim to the cruel hand of mother nature. (The addition of liability coverage came with our country’s gradual embrace of lawsuits as a cash-acquisition strategy.)

Anyway, back to the point. Insurance is supposed to cover us in the event of accident or extreme weather event or other calamity that would be financially perilous. It is not meant to pay for things we’d simply rather not pay for, like tree removal, for example. That would count as maintenance, and if insurers got in the business of paying to maintain houses, well, they’d either go bankrupt or raise your premiums by 1000 percent.

Insurers get a lot of flack, and some of it is earned. But some of their unpopularity comes from a basic misunderstanding of what insurance is supposed to cover.

Related:

• The Cost of Insurance: Anatomy of a Premium