You don't understand why people should be able to cook food and heat their houses?

This is a governance failure: for letting prices get out of control, for allowing poverty so bad that _people cannot heat their homes_, and then for allowing utilities to shut off people's utilities like this.

It doesn't have to be that way: on that last point for example, in Ontario, Canada, there's a law that says that a utility cannot shut off a house's electricity or gas during the winter for non-payment. It doesn't matter how far behind you get on your bills, it's illegal to shut it off. This would, I think, make pre-payment meters illegal here, and this probably explains why I've never heard of them being a thing.