6 ms·

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

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.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places They protected the neighbouring property.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
> 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. ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  It's also a Reagan law. So you can say that it was Reagan that introduced universal healthcare to the US.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Eh, kinda, but it's not like you can walk into an ER with just any condition and get treated for free. You've got to be having pretty serious problems before they're required to do anything about it, and even then they're not required to fully treat you, just get you stable.
  - Kkoala 4y ago
    Imagine thinking that mandatory stabilizing emergency care means "universal healthcare" I hope that was a joke
  - superpatosainz 4y ago
    That's not what universal healthcare means.
chadash 4y ago
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.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  it's fire, if they're ever not doing it with the same fervor then we have a problem. It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and work on containment, but what's being described here isn't that.
- vkou 4y ago
  The Obamacare penalty for not buying insurance was eliminated by Trump, because reintroducing the free rider problem is a cornerstone of GOP health policy. Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it. Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place, I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
  - djbebs 4y ago
    There is no free rider problem.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions, and restrictions on which factors can be used to set pricing for policies—both wildly popular—create a free rider problem.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        Funny how it's a problem only in the "richest country in the world". It also pales in comparison to the burden and costs of existing system in the US.
yardie 4y ago
They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Just not with the same fervor of preventing property damage.
- flutas 4y ago
  > And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Reading the article, that's not true. They watered down the fence line to protect someone else's land. > Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee. > "They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said. So to your examples... > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  Funny, we get called for much less than a hurt knee and failing vision via 911 every day. I don't have a choice other to send them to the ER if that is what they want. I recently went to a call where the young man thought he took too much "extenze"... Long story short, we checked vitals and asked if he wanted to be seen at ER for further evaluation. "Nah man, I got work to do now... just thought I was gonna die for a second." Anxiety and Panic... number one call type.
  - rhacker 4y ago
    My wife called for me because I accidentally drank my mouthwash. I couldn't speak and technically couldn't breath for a minute. And I would have been fine, but the bottle said to call poison control (or something - this was 10 years back) if ingested. So my wife called while I was wheezing. By the time the ambulance arrived I was totally fine... sorry about that too
- smnrchrds 4y ago
  > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example, if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at the moment.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Going by the linked article, they did care about neighboring property (whose owner paid the fee in advance), so they controlled the spread.
LarryMullins 4y ago
> 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 So will firefighters. They'll save your life to the best of their ability, no matter any contracts, payments, taxes, etc. Saving your house is another matter.
- monkmartinez 4y ago
  Number one priority on any emergency scene. Life safety... my crew comes first, but I have taken some serious risk to save people. Once the humans and animals are safe, everything else is less concerning. Risk a lot to save a lot. Most "things" can be replaced. My crew takes great pride in saving homeowners animals these days as we now have some tools to help post smoke/heat exposure (Cyanokit and O2).
  - flandish 4y ago
    Adding a second reply with same sentiment. I am also a firefighter, and my main “assignment” over the years has been search/rescue. We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.
    - elliottkember 4y ago
      Thank you (both) for your service to the community.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      There’s also a point where a structure is a total loss even if the “damage doesn’t look so bad from out here” at which point letting it burn as long as other buildings aren’t in danger may be the safest thing to do.
- fakedang 4y ago
  [flagged]
zehaeva 4y ago
This actually hasn't always been the case. In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until 1986, which was part of the COBRA act. Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
ghufran_syed 4y ago
Not true. An emergency department in the US is obligated to provide life-saving care, as are EMS services and hospital doctors if the ER doc thinks you have an immediately life threatening condition . But a random oncologist has no obligation to treat you if you have a life-threatening cancer, unless you go to an ER and they determine that your condition is immediately life-threatening (say, a perforated bowel). Then the surgeon will treat you enough that you are not inmediately dying, but they are not obligated to say, remove an underlying cancer if it’s not causing immediately life threatening problems
- gambiting 4y ago
  Well, quite obviously I meant emergency care, since I'm comparing it to a burning building.
citilife 4y ago
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?
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Usual response is the city annexes the land and starts policing it.
- db48x 4y ago
  You call the county sheriff. Sheriffs and courts were the original reason why counties exist, and why there aren't any parts of the country that exist outside of a county, while there are quite a lot of people living outside of any incorporated city.
kortilla 4y ago
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?
Spooky23 4y ago
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.
fatbird 4y ago
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.
paxys 4y ago
Doctors will save your life, not your property. It's the exact same in this case.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
No. Hospitals will do what they have to *against immediate threats*. They will not do what's needed in the bigger picture if they are not paid. You don't get the chemotherapy etc if you can't pay.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> fire can definitely spread and even if they don't care about your property they might care about other places They protected the neighbouring property.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yamtaddle 4y ago

> 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. ERs in the US are required to provide stabilizing care to patients who come in, even if the patient can't pay, by law. It's a law because otherwise some of them wouldn't.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
It's also a Reagan law. So you can say that it was Reagan that introduced universal healthcare to the US.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Eh, kinda, but it's not like you can walk into an ER with just any condition and get treated for free. You've got to be having pretty serious problems before they're required to do anything about it, and even then they're not required to fully treat you, just get you stable.
- Kkoala 4y ago
  Imagine thinking that mandatory stabilizing emergency care means "universal healthcare" I hope that was a joke
- superpatosainz 4y ago
  That's not what universal healthcare means.

chadash 4y ago

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.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
it's fire, if they're ever not doing it with the same fervor then we have a problem. It's one thing to declare something too dangerous and work on containment, but what's being described here isn't that.
vkou 4y ago
The Obamacare penalty for not buying insurance was eliminated by Trump, because reintroducing the free rider problem is a cornerstone of GOP health policy. Reinstating the penalty is going to cost political goodwill, which is why the Dems aren't doing it. Regardless of whether the penalty is or is not in place, I wouldn't recommend being poor and sick, regardless of whether you are insured, or are freeloading.
- djbebs 4y ago
  There is no free rider problem.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions, and restrictions on which factors can be used to set pricing for policies—both wildly popular—create a free rider problem.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Funny how it's a problem only in the "richest country in the world". It also pales in comparison to the burden and costs of existing system in the US.

yardie 4y ago

They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Just not with the same fervor of preventing property damage.

flutas 4y ago
> And they eventually put it out to prevent it spreading. Reading the article, that's not true. They watered down the fence line to protect someone else's land. > Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee. > "They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn," Cranick said. So to your examples... > They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. It would be closer to the story if it was "they won't save you, but they'll spray down everyone else with a disinfectant to protect them from your disease."
monkmartinez 4y ago
Funny, we get called for much less than a hurt knee and failing vision via 911 every day. I don't have a choice other to send them to the ER if that is what they want. I recently went to a call where the young man thought he took too much "extenze"... Long story short, we checked vitals and asked if he wanted to be seen at ER for further evaluation. "Nah man, I got work to do now... just thought I was gonna die for a second." Anxiety and Panic... number one call type.
- rhacker 4y ago
  My wife called for me because I accidentally drank my mouthwash. I couldn't speak and technically couldn't breath for a minute. And I would have been fine, but the bottle said to call poison control (or something - this was 10 years back) if ingested. So my wife called while I was wheezing. By the time the ambulance arrived I was totally fine... sorry about that too
smnrchrds 4y ago
> They will save your life. They won't treat your trick knee, erectile dysfunction, or failing vision. I thought in the US, hospitals were only required to stabilize, not treat, non-paying patients. For example, if someone has cancer, they are not required to perform surgery or chemotherapy, just stabilize their symptoms at the moment.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Going by the linked article, they did care about neighboring property (whose owner paid the fee in advance), so they controlled the spread.

LarryMullins 4y ago

> 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 So will firefighters. They'll save your life to the best of their ability, no matter any contracts, payments, taxes, etc. Saving your house is another matter.

monkmartinez 4y ago
Number one priority on any emergency scene. Life safety... my crew comes first, but I have taken some serious risk to save people. Once the humans and animals are safe, everything else is less concerning. Risk a lot to save a lot. Most "things" can be replaced. My crew takes great pride in saving homeowners animals these days as we now have some tools to help post smoke/heat exposure (Cyanokit and O2).
- flandish 4y ago
  Adding a second reply with same sentiment. I am also a firefighter, and my main “assignment” over the years has been search/rescue. We’ll always risk to reward. But more and more the phase after life saving is trending toward “surround and drown” - not that I want to fight like detroit in the 2010’s, but yes we do make a call sometimes to stop risking when lives are all confirmed safe.
  - elliottkember 4y ago
    Thank you (both) for your service to the community.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There’s also a point where a structure is a total loss even if the “damage doesn’t look so bad from out here” at which point letting it burn as long as other buildings aren’t in danger may be the safest thing to do.
fakedang 4y ago
[flagged]

zehaeva 4y ago

This actually hasn't always been the case. In fact Hospitals were not required to treat you until 1986, which was part of the COBRA act. Prior to that there was a large practice of "Patient Dumping" where a hospital would kick you out if they found out they you couldn't pay for your treatment. Hospitals in the US would literally let you die out side the ER doors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

ghufran_syed 4y ago

Not true. An emergency department in the US is obligated to provide life-saving care, as are EMS services and hospital doctors if the ER doc thinks you have an immediately life threatening condition . But a random oncologist has no obligation to treat you if you have a life-threatening cancer, unless you go to an ER and they determine that your condition is immediately life-threatening (say, a perforated bowel). Then the surgeon will treat you enough that you are not inmediately dying, but they are not obligated to say, remove an underlying cancer if it’s not causing immediately life threatening problems

gambiting 4y ago
Well, quite obviously I meant emergency care, since I'm comparing it to a burning building.

citilife 4y ago

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?

tedunangst 4y ago
Usual response is the city annexes the land and starts policing it.
db48x 4y ago
You call the county sheriff. Sheriffs and courts were the original reason why counties exist, and why there aren't any parts of the country that exist outside of a county, while there are quite a lot of people living outside of any incorporated city.

kortilla 4y ago

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?

Spooky23 4y ago

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.

fatbird 4y ago

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.

paxys 4y ago

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

LorenPechtel 4y ago

No. Hospitals will do what they have to *against immediate threats*. They will not do what's needed in the bigger picture if they are not paid. You don't get the chemotherapy etc if you can't pay.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]