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What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

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Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#91

Post by Nogwater »

Semiapies wrote: post #60
Nogwater wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thinking would only work in places where fire can't jump very far AND a very high percentage of people have paid. Living in Southern California with Santa Ana winds (warm, dry, and often over 50 mph) this would never work. The fire fighters can't just spray down the neighbor's houses because sparks can jump too far. A similar problem would occur if only 50% of people paid. Too many houses would burn for a reason…

To be fair, in big chunks of SoCal, it barely helps to aggressively fight every burning house. The pains of building houses on hills in an ecosystem centered around regular forest fires. :/

Fair enough. Still, fires do occasionally make it into the cities (I'm pretty sure I remember seeing one eat a neighborhood in San Bernardino a few years ago).

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#92

Post by elbrodeur »

tptacek wrote: post #76
elbrodeur wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem. It's been said in several other places but this sort of intellectual dishonesty can't be left alone. There are a plethora of examples currently in place in society that work well where if an uninsured person requires assistance they pay AT COST. If they can't afford out of pocket they set up a payment schedule.

Wait a minute. No they don't. People who sustain life-threatening injuries when uninsured do not pay "at cost". They don't pay at all. The hospital bankrupts them, and then the rest of society pays nominally increased premiums to cover them. This is a policy failure that has to be allowed to happen when we're talking about human life instead of property. This is a major flaw with our health system (which should be si…

>>People who sustain life-threatening injuries when uninsured do not pay "at cost". They don't pay at all. The hospital bankrupts them, and then the rest of society pays nominally increased premiums to cover them.

I should have said that people are provided services and given a bill. Recouping that cost is, as you point out, difficult or impossible in many cases.

>> But none of this has anything to do with what the fire department did. The fire happened outside their service area. They simply weren't obligated to respond to it.

I can't argue with that. But it's still irksome that there is no other recourse for someone confronting an extremely slow moving fire while people with high pressure hoses look on.

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#93

Post by tptacek »

elbrodeur wrote: post #92
tptacek wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute. No they don't. People who sustain life-threatening injuries when uninsured do not pay "at cost". They don't pay at all. The hospital bankrupts them, and then the rest of society pays nominally increased premiums to cover them. This is a policy failure that has to be allowed to happen when we're talking about human life instead of property. This is a major flaw with our health system (which should be si…

>>People who sustain life-threatening injuries when uninsured do not pay "at cost". They don't pay at all. The hospital bankrupts them, and then the rest of society pays nominally increased premiums to cover them. I should have said that people are provided services and given a bill. Recouping that cost is, as you point out, difficult or impossible in many cases. >> But none of this has anything to do with what the f…

Does it change your opinion at all that we're talking about a burning double-wide trailer, literally in the middle of nowhere?

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#94

Post by Semiapies »

tptacek wrote: post #79
Semiapies wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only "liberal" meant anything that specific, in practice. "Conservative" and "liberal" are both ridiculously bent terms in the US, reduced to meaning nothing more than "What Republicans want" and "What Democrats want". In practice, these aren't really all that different sets of demands - it's simply the propaganda of the Democrats to construe Republicans as militaristic psuedo-libertarians and the propaganda of th…

For what it's worth, I want what Democrats want: a strong public school system with centralized governance, national single-payer health care, legal protection for labor unions (I'm a fan of the 8-hour work day), a progressive tax system to pay for it, and the maximum possible business-friendliness obtainable given those constraints.

And if you thought the majority of Republicans didn't want the same thing on all those points, within some wiggle-room on definitions and chauvinism over which party's policies to do roughly the same thing are better...well, you'd be surprised talking to them, then.

Likewise, you and most other Democrats would probably go, "Hell, we want that, too!" if a Republican listed off eir concerns about national security, countering terrorism, balancing the budget, reducing waste, etc.

And when the rubber hits the road, even fewer differences come up. The Republicans never carried out their boast of dismantling the Department of Education back in the 90s; by 2000, Bush ran on the promise of further centralizing education and enlarging the DoE, both of which he did. Republicans acted as if Obama was going to cut and run in Iraq and Afghanistan, if it didn't turn out to be possible to simply surrender to Al Queda; this has, to say the very least, not happened.

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#95

Post by Semiapies »

tptacek wrote: post #93
elbrodeur wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>People who sustain life-threatening injuries when uninsured do not pay "at cost". They don't pay at all. The hospital bankrupts them, and then the rest of society pays nominally increased premiums to cover them. I should have said that people are provided services and given a bill. Recouping that cost is, as you point out, difficult or impossible in many cases. >> But none of this has anything to do with what the f…

Does it change your opinion at all that we're talking about a burning double-wide trailer, literally in the middle of nowhere?

I can see the point about "in the middle of nowhere", but aside from invoking classist and rural vs. urban prejudices, why should it being a "double-wide trailer" change anyone's opinion?

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#96

Post by anigbrowl »

cullenking wrote: post #54
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if I don't pay my taxes? Lots of annoying letters and then, eventually, maybe a court order plus fines etc. They don't demand money at gunpoint. And they'll still send the firetrucks if my house is on fire. We're a little more civilized than that. One of the reasons for universal fire service is to avoid the harm that comes when people try to do it on their own. You don't want random people - the homeown…

I promise that if you don't pay your taxes and refuse any additional fines, people with guns will knock on your door.

Possibly, but first they'll file a tax lien, allowing them to garnish your wages or bank account etc., and make your credit record radioactive until it's lifted. If you've ignored a court summons, that might result in an arrest warrant providing for you to be taken into custody at a police stop.

In general, you need to owe them quite a lot of money before they will go to the bother of looking for you, which is expensive and risky; it's a lot easier to just publicly flag you as a tax debtor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_lien

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#97

Post by duck »

anigbrowl wrote: post #75
tptacek wrote: post #56

This is coming up because of the Tennessee "firefighters watched it burn over $75" story. But there's backstory to that story. The fire department in question served a nearby town, and had no responsibility for the area where the fire occurred. As a service to people living outside their area, you could pay $75/year to get "out of area" coverage. The people who lost their house did two things to keep them from being…

But nobody is suggesting they should have just put the fire out for free . They should have put the fire out and billed him a sum many times higher than what the insurance premium would have been. The idea of insurance is to cap your liability, not to be a precondition for receiving any assistance.

For all we know they may have done this in the past and nobody ever paid. I mean, they didn't pay $75 a year and now they have a damaged house... seems like a good chance they won't pay afterwards when the amount is a lot higher.

It isn't like they allowed people to die in the fire, it was just a house. Just like if you wreck your car without coverage, you will be the one paying for it.

In the end, I'm sure this isn't easy for the firefighters (as the linked article mentions), but they have to make sure they provide the best service they can to those who they serve (their own town).

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#98

Post by tptacek »

Semiapies wrote: post #95
tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it change your opinion at all that we're talking about a burning double-wide trailer, literally in the middle of nowhere?

I can see the point about "in the middle of nowhere", but aside from invoking classist and rural vs. urban prejudices, why should it being a "double-wide trailer" change anyone's opinion?

It wasn't a large home, invested with generations of family sentiment, threatening a tree-lined street of houses. Put more bluntly: the property damage we're talking about here may have been minimal; to the person suggesting that the residents should have been allowed to pay, say, $5000 to get the department to help --- well, that may have been 40-50% of the value of the structure.

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#99

Post by Semiapies »

eru wrote: post #72
Semiapies wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, in big chunks of SoCal, it barely helps to aggressively fight every burning house. The pains of building houses on hills in an ecosystem centered around regular forest fires. :/

How about building houses made of stone?

Even stone and brick houses have flammable components. Even a completely non-flammable concrete bunker would have survivability issues with ventilation and temperature if surrounded by a forest fire for any significant length of time.

Re: What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily

#100

Post by duck »

tptacek wrote: post #86
elbrodeur wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did gloss over your main point, sorry. Insurance does work. It worked in this case: The neighbors houses were saved. But when insurance is the ONLY means by which a burning house can be saved we should rethink how we treat emergencies.

Yes. People should not be allowed to build residences in areas that don't have suitable fire coverage; the fees and taxes required to enlist surrounding communities into protecting them should be mandatory.

I don't want anyone telling me I can't build on land I own just because I can't get fire protection.
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