Agreed -- I did not mean to imply that it wasn't expensive -- but what you do is bake this into the positions. Entering a position without a hedge is dangerous, though of course equities are much less likely to have drastic drops (depending on the company). Hedging is still a good idea for the usual investor -- but obviously don't take losses on puts for years trying to time a downturn.

One thing I didn't note is the difficulty in timing -- if you held your puts too long, they would have gone back to zero with the insane rally we saw last month, for many reasons.