Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

tomscott.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 440 posts

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#291

Post by jasonhansel »

photochemsyn wrote: post #130

Clearly, the fundamental argument here is about private provision of services vs. public provision of services. Is the optimal fire protection service one based on private subscriber payment to firefighters or a publicly (taxpayer or other government revenue-funded) operated fire department? The best IMO way to view this is to first clarify whether or not that service falls into the 'natural monopoly' category, at le…

> People should be able to augment basic services however they wish, to they extent they can afford.

Here's the problem with such schemes. Often both the providers and the customers of "augmenting services" will have an incentive to hollow out the state-provided service until it's substandard.

For instance, let's say the government provides "basic" health insurance but allows private plans. Then the providers of private plans will lobby the government to keep the "basic" service as low-quality as possible, so that people are incentivized to buy the private plans. Furthermore, those who purchase private plans will not personally benefit much from the state-provided scheme, so they will have little interest in its success and little desire to subsidize it.

In the worst case, the result is that the state-run service becomes permanently low-quality. Then people attribute this to public-sector inefficiency and say that "obviously" the free market would do a better job. Then the state-provided service gets abolished when it never had a chance to succeed.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#292

Post by linuxdude314 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #205
Spooky23 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, god forbid, protect the general welfare of the population of Yahoo County by having a fire service? The government has the ability to tax for such services. As a partner who own a piece of a rental property in a ex-urban town, the volunteer fire company levies a tax that amounts to $300/year (based on valuation) which covers 2-3 towns with fire, ems and paramedic services.

Sure - but that doesn't cover the cases where we clearly have folks who do not pay, or regions that vote in ways to clearly place no priority on those shared services. And in your case - the results are actually very similar (What do you think happens when you fail to pay your city/county taxes? A lien on your title happens...) So again - I'm all for creating shared services and paying for them, but some folks aren't…

There shouldn’t need to be any external incentive aside from it being the firefighters job.

There seems to be a lot of people on this site that think life is fair.

Is it fair that you paid for firefighting and your neighbor didn’t but still had their house saved during a fire?

Arguably no, but that is completely irrelevant as it is still in the greater public interest for the fire to be put out.

There’s a certain childish aspect about caring about fairness in these types of situations as opposed to what is right and moral.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#293

Post by ljf »

Eleison23 wrote: post #144
legitster wrote: post #75

This reminds me of when I learned there was no such thing as "The Children's Crusade". As my history professor put it, "going to the Holy Land was an incredibly expensive endeavour reserved for a very few. There's no way anyone was going to waste it on young, inexperienced children". Nearly every source we had saying that the crusade involved children came much later, after a few writers referred to the same source w…

I wrote a research paper in college on the Children's Crusade, and the question I posed to be answered was "how many children participated in it?" It turns out that it was a real phenomenon, and many children did leave home, but being children, practically none of them made it to the Holy Land. The journey for many was much, much shorter. And likewise, for many it was merely a spiritual crusade and they went nowhere…

Sounds like a fascinating paper - would like to read that, or at least more of the sources.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#294

Post by EvanAnderson »

yamtaddle wrote: post #286
EvanAnderson wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without making any moral argument one way or the other: If people who can't pay and would otherwise die are given "free" treatment then we have socialized medicine. The costs are spread over everyone else. Uninsured and under-insured people are cited as one reason why treatment costs are so high. Whether these cases actually contribute to costs in a substantive way doesn't stop the mandate to provide free emergency c…

This is hair-splitting for no reason, to the point of destroying communication. Nobody (because this is HN: yes, apparently at least one person, but you know what I mean by this) means ERs having to eat the cost of stabilizing uninsured dying/in-labor people when they say "socialized medicine". You can draw some parallels, but trying to put that, plus all the things people actually mean by the term, under the same um…

I fully admit to being hyperbolic.

Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beliefs there as well.

I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#295

Post by vdqtp3 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #259
munificent wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that population density is relevant here as the issue is one of right. It is absolutely relevant because services can only be logistically and economically viable at certain levels of density. Fire services aren't very useful if it takes them a two-hour drive to reach the fire. So they have a maximum radius where they are useful. They only provide value to the people within that radius. If the density…

Public services are not expected to be 'economically viable' on their own. Moreover, whether there are enough people to support service is also a purely administrative and political issue. You're not addressing my point, either, which is that there is a big difference between getting a crap service because you're hard to reach (which does happen including here in Europe) and having no right to call for help in the fi…

> Public services are not expected to be 'economically viable' on their own.

They inherently are. If these neighborhoods have fire coverage equivalent to that of a metropolis, but they would be paid for via taxation at the rate of $50K per year per household, that's not economically viable.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#296

Post by gusgus01 »

jtlienwis wrote: post #67

Maritime Law had a provision for salvors that saved ships in distress from sinking. If a salvor saved a ship from sinking, they were entitled to a percentage of the worth of a ship. Maybe terrestrial law needs something similar in the case of uninsured building on fire.

Interestingly, something similar happens with maritime law as to what was alluded to in the article and in this post. Similar to the competition and chaos caused by "First to respond and put it out", certain salvage companies will ignore Coast Guard warnings that a boat is already accounted for, that the insurance company has already hired a salvage company to reclaim the boat, and instead other salvage companies will try to hurry out to the boat and claim it. Similar to the Terry Pratchett quote, salvage companies will fortuitously find that your boat detached from a mooring ball and drifted to sea if it's left unmanned for long periods of time.

So while a pretty good system, it's not without its flaws and perverse incentives.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#297

Post by yamtaddle »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #294
yamtaddle wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hair-splitting for no reason, to the point of destroying communication. Nobody (because this is HN: yes, apparently at least one person, but you know what I mean by this) means ERs having to eat the cost of stabilizing uninsured dying/in-labor people when they say "socialized medicine". You can draw some parallels, but trying to put that, plus all the things people actually mean by the term, under the same um…

I fully admit to being hyperbolic. Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beli…

> Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beliefs there as well.

Suburb in a red state here, grew up mostly in rural red America, so I get what you mean. I'm sure there's also a lot of thinking that free ER care is a lot more expansive than it really is, and belief that "welfare types" (ahem, cough, cough, lay-finger-along-side-of-nose) regularly use ERs to get ordinary healthcare for free. As is usually the case, I expect laying out what's actually available and how the mandate actually works tends to soften resistance to it. I'm well aware that the Left does some of this too, but god I wish right-wing media would stop misleading Republicans about how basic things like social-safety-net programs and taxes work. The death of the Fairness Doctrine, however not-entirely-comfortable I may be with the thing, has been a curse on this country, in practice.

> I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.

Ugh, tell me about it. I especially think the enormous proportion of medical spending that's already public isn't well-understood enough. Especially since some of those tend to cover some of the most expensive demographics—the elderly, the disabled, soldiers. Failure to grasp how our current system already works leads to those infamous "keep government out of my medicare!" protest signs and, more importantly, failure to appreciate that shifting to cover everyone with one variety or another of government-funded healthcare is actually a far less radical shift than some seem to suppose it is.

Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been less confrontational with that previous post.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#298

Post by bombolo »

mabbo wrote: post #198
that_guy_iain wrote: post #143

Even with this information included. I think the moral of the story is America has some very serious third-world problems. The reason things like this go on in America and not in any other developed country is that Americans just accept it. "They didn't pay, so they die." Here is how much they accept it, firefighters literally stood and watched a building burn down instead of playing with their toys. Not only that, t…

The solution is that the government steps in and says "No, you must ". And American culture does not like when government says "must". But in the rest of the world, we act like grown ups and accept that sometimes, it's perfectly okay.

> And American culture does not like when government says "must".

Except when it's about treating everyone like terrorists in airports, I presume.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#299

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

vkou wrote: post #283
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery was also considered above-board at one point, so... 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!

> Slavery was also considered above-board at one point, so... 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 p…

stop tilting at windmills,

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.

Re: Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?

#300

Post by Faark »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #204
pdonis wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are egregiously misinformed about the US.

How so? Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort of society doesn't look after it's own? Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own? I could carry on but it's a bit pointles…

German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it being increasingly hard to get back into the public one, especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".

Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.

Post reply on HN