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Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

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Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#111

Post by kortilla »

gambiting wrote: post #13
yardie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Saving burning buildings with no people in them is still a risk to the firefighters’ lives. Why go through that when the owners explicitly declined the protection repeatedly?

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#112

Post by fatbird »

HWR_14 wrote: post #107
yardie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The family accepted fire protection from their insurer and claim they forgot to pay the $75 fee, not declined to do so. It's possible they opted out, it's also possible it was an oversight. Certainly, the more human thing would be to make opting in/out more explicit and handle a late payment by sending it to collections (or reminder notifications) instead of just turning service off. Or do you have any evidence they…

A reporter on the scene spoke to the homeowner, who said he didn't pay the fee because he thought he could just pay after, like happened previously. He literally thought he could get away with not paying unless a fire happened. It's a textbook case of moral hazard.

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.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#113

Post by dahfizz »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #101
vkou wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump's government repealed the individual mandate penalty, and then the court ruled ruled that in it's new form, it no longer qualified as a tax and was unconstitutional. (Not that this meant anything, since the legality of a fee of $0 doesn't matter.) 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 il…

calling insurance a tax is about as strong an indication of regulatory capture as I can think of. 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…

I agree with you, but the "tax" is the penalty for not having health insurance. The health insurance itself isn't considered a tax.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#114

Post by Spooky23 »

gambiting wrote: post #13
yardie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sort of.

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.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#115

Post by tedunangst »

citilife wrote: post #69
gambiting wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then you protect the insured buildings, not really sure why it's an issue? 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?

Usual response is the city annexes the land and starts policing it.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#116

Post by [deleted] »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #100
bluedino wrote: post #79

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.

Why is trash pickup not bundled with property taxes? It's seems ridiculous to charge for it separately when every occupied home will generate a similar amount of trash.

[deleted]

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#117

Post by dmoy »

someweirdperson wrote: post #104
chadash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Gun wound" as in a wound caused by (actively) using a gun, or a bullet wound, typically caused by someone else using a gun? I could understand the former (like excluding accidents while skiing, skydiving, whatever), but excluding the latter seem pretty cynical.

The vast majority of gun wounds in the US are purposeful crimes or suicides

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.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#118

Post by dantheman »

mook wrote: post #98
aaronax wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These costs still exist in a hypothetical year with zero fires, though. Additionally, people whose house were just on fire with zero insurance are probably not in a good financial position (anymore), and they are unlikely to be able to pay…

If you don't have the money, then a lien is placed on the property and it will be sold to pay the debt. Or you can take out a mortgage to buy it. In any case you'll be richer than if the house is burned down.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#119

Post by fatbird »

gambiting wrote: post #13
yardie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The municipal fire department's insurer told them that they would not cover injuries sustained while fighting fires on uninsured homes, which was the final straw for the fire department.

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.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#120

Post by paxys »

gambiting wrote: post #13
yardie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Doctors will save your life, not your property. It's the exact same in this case.
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