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Seems like the agreement could be backed with the threat of a lien on your property.
The property that just burned down?
Even then, there's still the value of the land.
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Hmmmm. I mean, yes, but doctors will still save your life even if you declined to buy any insurance all life long or pay taxes or whatever. I'm not sure I want the same "protect at all costs" attitude extended to buildings, but fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places.
But people complain about this too. No one seriously talks about not treating people in the ER with gun wounds, but Obamacare explicitly introduced the mandate that you get insurance or pay a penalty to address this very issue. Everyone is entitled to a basic level of care, but the mandate says that you should have to pay for it.
It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and work on containment, but what's being described here isn't that.
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There must be a price that the fire department could theoretically charge if they were gonna always charge on the spot, and still make a profit, as long as there is some minimum number of fires. 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 sen…
How would you deal with the credit risk? or are you assuming that the homeowner has arbitrary amounts of cash, at hand, but somehow not in the burning house?
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This story still makes the rounds, and the result is still the same. The family chose to live in unincorporated land. They turned down fire protection when the county offered it to them. They turned down fire protection when their insurer offered it to them. The fire department did what was required to save lives. Insurance can take care of the rest...oh, that's right.
If it wasn't a gov agency, something could have been worked out on the spot. Ask them if they want to pay the full price, what is it $10k, $20k?. 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.
Sorry but I do not believe this. The paper rings a lot of alarm bells. It provides very little evidence for the actual thesis it is trying to prove and provides ample evidence that seem related to the thesis it is trying to prove but in fact it does nothing to prove it. Thus, the paper provides plenty of evidence that insurance companies helped each other to fight fires at sites insured by their fellow insurance comp…
As far as I know, there are still plenty of examples of that model failing hideously in various ways (eg: [1][2], and many examples of unproductive competition from TFA itself). This article is specifically about firefighting in London, in a certain time period — notably starting after the Great Fire, when presumably those dangers were fresh in people's minds.
And also, to its credit, I think the article leaves the question pretty muddy and un-answered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus#Rise_to_power_and_wealth
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed#Early_careerI didn't realize this was even an assertion that people made at all. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. People at the time must have known that fires in cities were extremely dangerous because they could spread over a great area. It's logical that insurers would want to work together to prevent all fires, purely out of self-interest to protect their insured properties, and then sue the pants off negligent and/or u…
But then what is the incentive for anyone to get coverage if they know that any fires will be put out regardless...? Unless the fire service is paired with insurance covering the cost of a rebuild? But I don't think the original fire services offered that.
The coverage is apparently to pay for damages. It's not fire insurance, it's property insurance, in case of fire.
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How do you calculate the "full cost" of having staff on call 24/7, well maintained equipment that's regularly inspected, building inspectors to verify that fire code is being met to keep usage down to sustainable levels, and so on? The full cost isn't $10k in salary and gasoline and foam, it's millions.
Total cost of running the department for a year, divided by the number of callouts. Possibly weight the callout types depending on approximate resources consumed. Though I am fully in support of just letting the house burn.
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Article doesn't seem to agree with you here, instead citing different reason: > 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.
dantheman was proposing agreeing to pay the full cost (tens of thousands of dollars), not just the advance fee ($75).
We have a ~$200 fee for trash pickup in our municipality. You get the bill every year. If you don't pay it, a 10% penalty is added. The next step, a lien is placed on the property. They never stop picking up the trash, though. The next purchaser of your property has to pay the existing trash bill! This same council raised water rates so they could reduce the penalties for late water bill payments.