Fire sale: Fire Department lets home burn over $75.00 fee.

You misunderstand. People often pay in advance even when they have the option of paying for the services when they need them. This is exactly the case with medical insurance - you can always pay cash for your bills, but it's far cheaper to buy the insurance, even though there's a huge chance you won't need it. I posit the same for the fire services.

No, my theory said nothing about allowing people to buy insurance after they need it. My theory does allow for them to pay for their medical bills in cash.

My theory called for charging a large and punitive rate for paying for services on the spot, instead of in advance. This is a strong deterrent for waiting until you need the service to pay for it, and it has the added bonus of avoiding a large loss of property and value for the entire community.

Not only that, but you are conflating Insurance with Cost. It's not the same thing. I said nothing about allowing the people with a house on fire to buy fire insurance.

It isn't more reasonable, because real-world experience shows us that people do not act in the way that you assert they will. In short, your Game Theory example doesn't hold up to reality.

An expensive exception - one that likely would profit the FD. I don't think they would care too much if more people chose to pay them higher rates - they would be servicing those same fires in any case, for less money!

No, they wouldn't have. This is simply a false assertion on your part which is not born out by the reality of our experiences with other forms of insurance.

Not only that, but your situation is so far away from reality as to not match what we were describing at all. The FD in question didn't rely upon the $75 fees for its existence. The FD in question was paid for out of local town tax funds in a neighboring town. The $75 was for extended service to outlying areas. So, no; charging people in outlying areas on the spot wouldn't have put an end to the FD in any fashion.

This is what I mean when I say that the ideological situation you posit doesn't match reality: it really doesn't. I'm sure there's some perfect simulacra of a libertarian FD in your head, but that's not what we are talking about at all.

It most certainly was not. The FD profitted in no way by not putting out the fire; hell, they even had people on the scene! They were paying for them to be out there in any rate! No money was saved, by anyone, for letting the house burn down, and no greater point was proven to anyone - other than that Libertarians are some of the biggest dicks out there.

I must say, for a sharp guy, you haven't thought this one out very well.

failures art wrote:

Insurance companies don't treat patients, doctors and nurses do. Insurance companies pay doctors and hospitals.

True. Your point?

failures art wrote:

The fire department does have an ethical obligation here, and if fulfilling their ethical obligation despite the lack of payment encourages others under this system to stop paying, then the point should be that the current system doesn't work.

I'm not convinced that the fire department has an ethical obligation here. And the system works fine -- except, of course, for people like Mr. Crainick who don't pay the $75 fee and whose houses burn down. That's where the system sorta' breaks down.

failures art wrote:

While you have a point that the FD is offering a service to residents that otherwise would have it, the fact that they otherwise wouldn't have it is worth critical address. The idea that this kind of service is in any way optional is present in the policies of the area, and in the homeowner's choice.

Indeed, and, as a member of the community, I'm sure that Mr. Crainick, at some point, must have had the opportunity to express his support or opposition to that policy at the ballot box.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mr. Crainick, before his house burned down, preferred the policy of voluntary payment to one that would have taxed him for the same service. No doubt he would be having second thoughts about that now, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

By Katherine Hobson

The Census Department is out with its annual report on income, poverty and health insurance in the U.S.


On that last front, the headline finding is that the proportion of people without health insurance in the U.S. rose to 16.7% last year from 15.4% in 2008. The 1.5 million drop in the number of insured people — to 253.6 million — represents the first such decline since 1987, when this kind of data began to be collected, the report says.

Other health-insurance nuggets from the report:

The proportion of the population covered by private plans fell to 63.9% from 66.7% in 2008.

The percentage of the population covered by employer-based plans is 55.8% — the lowest since 1987, the first year for which data are available, the government says.

Meantime, the proportion covered by government programs rose to 30.6% (also the highest since 1987) from 29% in 2008. Medicare enrollment was unchanged, but 15.7% of the population is now on Medicaid, compared to 14.1% in 2008.

The percentage of kids under 18 who were uninsured was unchanged at 10%. The uninsured rate for those 65 and up was also unchanged, but a greater proportion of the people in other age groups were uninsured last year. The rate among 18-to-24-year-olds was 30.4%.

By region, northeastern states had the lowest uninsured rate, at 12.4% (still an increase from 2008), followed by the Midwest (13.3%), West (18.3%) and South (19.7%).

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My theory called for charging a large and punitive rate for paying for services on the spot, instead of in advance. This is a strong deterrent for waiting until you need the service to pay for it, and it has the added bonus of avoiding a large loss of property and value for the entire community.

I calculated $25K earlier. I think that would work. If you hadn't paid the $75, and you need the fire department, you pay $25K based on the standard fee ($75) divided by the probablity of a significant house fire (1/300 per year) and a 10% penalty.

I think you need to visit Kentucky.

Again, the fire service fee is the equivalent of an insurance premium.

Your deterrent wasn't deterrent enough. That was my point. In order to make it sufficiently deterrent, you'd have to charge something like $25,000, as engineer explained. But then, instead of Mr. Crainick complaining that the fire department wouldn't put out his fire for want of the $75 fee, he'd be complaining that they wouldn't put out the fire because he couldn't fork over $25K, and then there'd be the inevitable hand-wringing about how it's not fair that Mr. Crainick should have to watch his house burn down because he didn't have $25K. I fail to see the difference.

Real-world experience is based on the real world, not the world that you're imagining. That's my point.

My point is that the fire department is not analogous to the insurance company but rather the doctor.

Mr. Cranick is certainly a part of the problem, but let's not run away with this.

And such should be the lesson for us all to value our public services and appreciate the importance of funding them. It should not take burning down a house and the loss of loved pets for this message to set in. I hope this community reverses their error.

I can truly say that I have never been so disgusted by people as I was after reading some of those comments.

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Again, the fire service fee is the equivalent of an insurance premium.

No, it's not. You are 100% incorrect here. Firefighting services are an immediate and urgent need to stop a major problem from continuing and spreading. The cost of each fire call is minimal by any estimation; even at the rate of 20k per call (which we know isn't the case) it's still an order of magnitude cheaper than the amount insurance has to pay...

Insurance is totally different; it pays for the rebuilding and repair costs AFTER an event. I at no time advocated for people to be able to buy INSURANCE to replace their house, after it's on fire.

No, you don't want to see the difference. In one case, the guys house burns down and he has zero options, even if he wished to pay an inflated amount, he couldn't. In the other scenario, he's making a business decision and CHOOSING not to. There is a major difference between the two.

Mine isn't imaginary. In the real world we see that people quite often pay for insurance in advance of need, even when they have the option of paying at the time of service; which you specifically claimed that they wouldn't do.

No, I claimed they wouldn't pay for insurance when the option was available for them to pay for it whenever they needed it. You claim that they would. That's the imaginary world.

man whose home burned down because he hadn't paid a $75 municipal fee said he had made a simple mistake and wasn't trying to take advantage of the system.

"I'm no freeloader, I've worked all my life for everything I've got," Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee, told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC on Tuesday evening. "It happens to anybody, I don't care, you forget things and I did. I suffered the consequences for it."

snip

Kelly Edmison, fire chief of nearby Union City, said a fire tax would be better than the current fee system.

"Without a doubt, the best is a fire tax," Olbermann quoted Edmison as saying. "The last thing a firefighter wants to do is not be able to help when they'd like to."

Other locals have been sympathetic during this trying period, Cranick told Olbermann.

"Most everybody has been compassionate and neighborly," he told MSNBC. "I understood some of the firefighters went home and were sick. Some of them even cried over it."

"I appreciate it," he said.

Cranick, who is living in a trailer on his property, says his insurance policy will help cover some of his lost home. More

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No, I claimed they wouldn't pay for insurance when the option was available for them to pay for it whenever they needed it. You claim that they would. That's the imaginary world.

People do this constantly in the real world; that's what insurance is.

You are conflating 'paying for insurance' with 'paying to get the result people want.' This is a false conflation on your part. You are misusing 'it' in your post above; 'it' is the result, not the method, of delivery.

For example, medical insurance. People pay for years without actually needing the service - and nothing is stopping them for actually paying for the health care out of pocket when a problem arises, and just pocketing and investing the premium monies instead.

You specifically stated that most people wouldn't purchase insurance if they knew they could pay for those services later, even at a higher rate. Evidence shows that this is in fact untrue; most people, when given the option, choose to pay a lower rate up front rather than wait for a much, much higher bill later on.

People don't buy health insurance when they get sick because that option isn't available to them.

Oh, I see. You're conflating the result with the method of delivery. Health insurance isn't the same thing as medical services.

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People don't buy health insurance when they get sick because that option isn't available to them.

No, but the option of paying for the services they need most certainly is. Anyone can pay cash for medical services. Your example is a poor one, because you keep focusing on the method of delivery instead of the services desired. This is a mistake on your part.

My example more closely replicates the situation we are discussing than yours does. When given an opportunity to pre-pay for their services in terms of health insurance, the majority of people do indeed choose to do so. This contradicts your assertion that most would choose not to do so.

I am getting pretty fed up with the way that you consistently misrepresent my position. I will repeat it one more time, just to give you another opportunity to screw it up: I didn't say that people wouldn't pay for insurance, I said that they wouldn't pay for insurance when the option was available for them to pay for it whenever they needed it.