>>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.

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

I'm having trouble understanding why it should. The main thing that is difficult for me to accept is that the fire department was there, within rock-throwing distance of a fire, and did nothing except make sure the neighbors who were covered were protected.

Because by omitting the specifics, you're coloring your interpretation of the event. There were no injuries. Nobody's life was threatened. The structure itself was likely of marginal financial value --- it was a mobile home on unincorporated land. There's "fire", and then there's "fire".

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.

Is your point that the residents might not be able to pay the $5000 bills in such a case?

My point is that absent some actual meaningful obligation, perhaps the fire department didn't have a particularly strong moral reason to engage with this fire. Even in the city, the department might let, say, a garage burn to the ground.

A garage is not usually a place people live in, making it a qualitatively different thing. You're suggesting a "moral" difference between expensive homes and inexpensive homes.

People generally live in double-wide trailers because they can't afford nicer houses. If someone's trailer burns down, that person is out of a house just as much as some guy in a McMansion would be if it burned down. Someone whose double-wide burned down probably has less saved money and fewer resources to take care of emself with than someone who just lost a McMansion.

Ok. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying, the specifics of the situation --- a house that was probably worth low 5 figures --- do matter to me.

Fair enough, but why? I'm not trying to be leading here, I just don't understand.

Let's suppose the chance of a fire is 1% every 10 years. So 100 houses pay 100 * 75$/year * 10 years = 75,000$ per fire. Now if the house is worth < 75,000$ then paying the cost of putting it out is not worth it to the property owner.

As to why it might cost that much per fire, it's probably low probability event so you need to pay for all the time, training, and equipment that sit's unused between emergency's. Add in the overhead in showing up to events like this one where they receive zero compensation and you have a major free rider problem.

Working back from the fee is a very questionable assumption for the cost.

For that matter, I asked whether it was a case of people not reasonably being able to afford the cost five levels up; I'm asking about a "moral" distinction tptacek sees.