And here we are in modern times where we do, indeed, let buildings burn.
> No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn
> Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.
> No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn
> Firefighters in rural Tennessee let a home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn't paid a $75 fee.
They protected the neighbouring property.
ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
I hope that was a joke
Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it.
Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place, I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
It also pales in comparison to the burden and costs of existing system in the US.
If your point is just that the US healthcare system is far more-broken than most, and in some unique ways, all for no good reason—sure, yeah, of course that's true.
The court case as a whole argued that because the GOP changed the ACA in a manner that made part of it (the $0 fee) illegal, the entirety of the ACA should be made illegal.
The fifth circuit agreed with some of the arguments in the case (the fee one), but did not practically change anything about the ACA.
And then SCOTUS, surprising ~everyone, ruled that actually the whole of the ACA is constitutional.
Look at this timeline, and you tell me - who spent years trying to re-introduce the free rider problem, and to break the ACA? Congress, the president, and the plaintiff states... or the fifth circuit, which when presented with a singular, narrow question, ruled that a $0 fee (whatever that is) isn't a tax?
Now, as of 2022, we are in a world where the ACA has been thoroughly litigated, and is still here, with the free rider problem hanging like a millstone over its neck.
It should have never been a tax specifically because it's an unconstitutional act. Calling it a tax is the letter vs the spirit of the constitution.
If you and others like yourself want to ensure everyone has health insurance then __make it mandatory for the state to pay for it__. Anything else and you're just taxing the poor for being poor.
That is an interesting opinion, but at this point, both a conservative, and then a super-conservative, packed-with-federalist-society SCOTUS has disagreed with you twice on this issue (5-4) and then (7-2). It's about as written-in-stone as you can get in the United States.
The courts think this is above-board, the executive thinks this is above-board, most of the public thinks its above-board, it's safe to say its above-board.
lets not use that as justification, shall we?
carrying private service X is required for you to exist in the united states. If you don't pay for X, you get fined Y as a punishment.
yep, I'm sure the powers-that-be considering that above-board should be the only justification we need!
It was also perfectly constitutional[0], hence the need for that 13th amendment. And that civil war thing. As it turns out, the constitution kind of sucks[0], it has a lot of problems with it. Fewer than it did in the past, but we aren't quite at the end of history just yet.
You're going to need a better complaint than 'it's unconstitutional', as this is pretty verifiably constitutional. The people who have been empowered[1] by the founding fathers to determine what is, and what is not constitutional have determined that this is constitutional. It's not a matter of opinion at this point.
> carrying private service X is required for you to exist in the united states.
And that's nothing new. Government can compel all sorts of things from you. Showing up to contribute your labour to a jury duty. Involuntary servitude in the military. Taxing the land you live on. Following emergency orders. Not heading a communist political movement. Every society - even this society - provides you with privileges, and requires obligations from you.
This obligation has been ruled to be well within the legal framework of this society, and if you think it should be outside that legal framework, you should look into passing a constitutional amendment on the subject.
Or, you could believe that this obligation is a constitutional, but bad idea, and have the legislature repeal it. Either way, it's currently constitutional. [0]
[0] You're confusing 'constitutional' with 'just'. They are not the same thing.
[1] Actually, SCOTUS' powers in this sphere are what's unconstitutional[2], but we all close our eyes, and collectively pretend that they are.
[2] You're not going to find anything in either the constitution, or passed legislature granting SCOTUS the incredibly broad powers it currently enjoys. These powers were invented out of thin air, and are backed by neither fiat, nor democratic will. All that the constitution says on the subject is 'We should, like, probably have courts. That should do stuff, maybe.'
the question is whether or not the government can force you to pay for a __PRIVATE__ service just for __EXISTING__ within the borders of the US.
There is __NO PRECEDENT__ for this. The closest you can get are things like car insurance where you're required to carry insurance in order to drive on US roads. You can choose not to drive, you cannot choose to "not exist".
That puts this into an entirely different category. The fact that it originally got rationalized as a tax opens a whole different can of worms. Good luck refusing to pay taxes.
Additionally, the whole point of these cases was not simply to get rid of the penalty. The idea was to get rid of the penalty so they could go back to the supreme court and again claim that the mandate is unconstitutional because now there is no "tax" associated with it.
I don't know where things are at now, but it seems unlikely to go anywhere now because it would be difficult to argue that buying insurance is required at all at this point. So we are left with the backup gop strategy of hoping that disarming the mandate will simply bankrupt the program. At least until republican voters wake up and realize that the program is miles better than what we had before.
This mandate makes sense from a moral point of view, especially for true emergency situations. However, the act didn't take care of the cost of care, which was placed on hospitals and ultimately passed on to other patients and the government. Obamacare attempted to address this issue.
EMTALA also distorted US healthcare be redirecting poorer people to expensive emergency care rather than preventive or primary care, which might well serve many of their needs better. That's also something that Obamacare was designed to fix.
$80 billion of 3.4 trillion. A rounding error.
It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and work on containment, but what's being described here isn't that.
For deaths, there's maybe 300 accidental deaths, 10,000 - 15,000 homicides, and like 60,000 suicides. Non-death injuries scale similarly, with the caveat that like 6,000 ish people per year try to kill themselves with a gun and fail, but still injure themselves.
Reading the article, that's not true.
They watered down the fence line to protect someone else's land.
> Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee.
> "They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said.
So to your examples...
> They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision.
It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example, if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at the moment.
So will firefighters. They'll save your life to the best of their ability, no matter any contracts, payments, taxes, etc.
Saving your house is another matter.
We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.
In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until 1986, which was part of the COBRA act.
Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
The same logic could apply to police... what if all the crime is coming from an unincorporated part of town? Do you just go and start policing it (kind of like an invading army occupying)? Or do you erect borders / station patrol cars near key locations?
They will save you from an acute emergency, stabilize you, then dump you into a care home with inadequate care or to the street as appropriate, where you play the long game of succumbing to whatever ails you.
The FD had tried for years to find a workable solution and failed because the people in the unincorporated part of the county just didn't want to pay for fire services. IIRC, the county had tried three times in the previous decade to pass taxes to either fund the municipal FD or set up their own; three times the residents of the unincorporated part voted against it. The FD had tried retroactively charging owners, and spent more on collections than they'd earn.
If you don't pay, you'd have the lowest priority. But there is no reason other than bureaucracy that they couldn't have handled it.
Even then, there's still the value of the land.
> South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.
Though I am fully in support of just letting the house burn.
And it doesn't have to be guaranteed if it works 90% of the time.
The second part is more significant in people simply don't have the money to pay.
[1] https://stories.opengov.com/somervillema/published/BhSqQ0eG2
Or there would simply be no fire service at all because the rural area isn't profitable to service.
Or do you have any evidence they actively opted out of the $75 payment?
I discussed the case a lot at the time it happened, and it never came out that he "forgot" to pay the fee. It was very clear at the time that he thought he didn't need to and they'd put out the fire anyway.
1) Insured by another company. The sensible course of action is to fight the fire and bill them. Every company benefits from such cooperation.
2) Uninsured. The moral hazard problem, if too many people are not paying the only sensible approach is to let uninsured buildings burn.
At any rate, in response to the story, the county changed it so paying when your house was already ablaze was a punitive but not impossible option. I believe it was $3,500 when they instituted it.
Which, frankly, seems like the proper way to handle the moral hazard.
How do you deal with freeloaders in society?
Meanwhile, governments have excellent was of collecting on low-four figure debts secured by real estate.
And, as I pointed out, the appropriate punishment for freeloading is paying a heavy fine when you opt to use it.
If you're in the middle of nowhere you're probably also on unincorporated land, but the challenges of being in the middle of nowhere have nothing to do with the land being unincorporated.
People do live in some of these less-accessible part of the island, but it's outside of the department's service area. Fires in other areas are officially the responsibility of the regional fire service, like for forest fires. Our department might go on certain calls, especially life safety, but will typically keep some people and vehicles back in our own service area in case calls come in there as well.
I think the term for people outside of the district is "self-insured", because nobody else will be able to assist quickly.
At that time and place, fire protection wasn't considered a public service unless you lived in town. I never heard anyone question the arrangement and there was little appetite in that era for the tax increase that would've been required to provide universal protection.
Most states also have a county, but this is different from a township. New Jersey and Pennsylvania (as part of the original 13 colonies) don't take part in the federal township system and have their own system with the same name that is otherwise not related.
The linked article aside, letting buildings burn down is in fact standard procedure for fire fighters. A sufficiently dense fire is extremely hard to stop as long as it can fuel itself and a controlled burn down is often the only reasonable way to end a fire. It's not like anything would be recoverable in any case.
Defensive operations on an active fire ground are standard operating procedures; no argument.
But most departments do not operate the way this department in Tennessee does where they did not run the call when it was received because the caller was not on their participant list.
They would have likely encountered a brush fire or, at most, a room and contents fire from the structures closest exposure based on the story and they would not have let it just freely burn.
Where I live firefighters certain actions will require a fee (obviously not paid to the firefighters), like pumping out a cellar or felling a tree on private land which is not threatening any property, but actually not fighting a fire when it would be easily possible would be unthinkable.
This means that often saving lives and saving property can not be done simultaneously. Some time ago here there was a report about house ownwers getting upset at firefighters for just standing around "doing nothing", while their property burned, which happened exactly for the reason outlined above.
Universal health care might have changed the firefighters' minds. On the other hand, perhaps other liabilities would not have been covered too, so maybe not.
Just because this was an emergency doesn't mean it wasn't unexpected. We would want firefighters to go the next town over if there was a fire there, so it seems like their insurance policy was improperly under specified.
They did have a plan, and they did execute on it - exactly as they advertised.
...and if they decided to risk it, and put out the fire anyway - and tied up all their pumps hoses ladders and trucks, and then another call comes in a few miles away - from someone that did pay for coverage - how much liability would they have for tying up all of their equipment at a fire they are not supposed to be fighting, and thus unable to respond to the fires they are supposed to be responding to?
People in this country should be free to make stupid decisions - and free to suffer the consequences of those stupid decisions.
Also it says that this TN guy had insurance. I wonder if it would have been worth his insurance company's while to make sure that $75 was always paid, either by paying it themselves, or making him pay it, or paying it and sending him the bill, and somehow making it a condition.. to protect themselves from having to pay out... as the London article is about insurance companies starting fire brigades themselves for that very reason
Not to mention the question of duress when the FD shows up and says "sign this and we'll put out the fire."
Back on the farm, which is 30 minutes from the nearest fire brigade, one does have to pay to opt-in for fire service. They still answer the phone if you're not on the list. You're also strongly encouraged to have a pond or cistern near anything you want saved. I don't know if the farm's mortgage required payment of that fee, but I do know we were given insurance discounts for having ponds near the houses and barn.
I do know of one case of a particularly belligerent property owner who refused to pay, had fires, still wouldn't pay, etc. who did eventually wind up with firefighters watching his property burn. Hard to really feel bad about something like that.