There used to be a time when investors didn't have to worry about the financial health of companies in the Dow Jones industrial average.

If a company was one of the 30 considered to be an important barometer of the U.S. economy, you'd think that it would have to be a relatively stable firm.

Sure, the company would go through some cyclical ups and downs like any other firm. But you wouldn't have to worry about it going belly-up without assistance from the government.

That's clearly no longer the case. In September, I wrote about why AIG had to be booted from the Dow a couple of days before the Federal Reserve bought a majority stake in the struggling insurance giant and the folks at Dow Jones Indexes made the decision to remove it from the Dow.

And I also recently argued that General Motors (GM, Fortune 500), which had to get a $13.4 billion loan from the federal government last month to avoid bankruptcy, should be kicked out of the Dow.