Reply #251: It was stated on Keith Olbermann's show

[LaurenG]

"And so—and another thing about it, they have waived these fire fees before. They waived them at my son‘s house three years ago in December. They waived them over on another road over here in out of town and saved the guy‘s house. But I know they waived them before. So, therefore, they could have waived mine.

I would have paid it. My neighbor offered to pay them. I don‘t know if it was $500 or $5,000 to spray the house down, put it out. But, no, they sprayed the fence row."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39536373/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/ about 1/4 of the way down.



The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning.
<snip>
The counterargument is, of course, that this kind of system only works if there are consequences for opting out. For the firefighters to have put out the blaze would have opened up a big moral hazard and generated a bunch of future free-riding — a lot like how the ban on denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, paired with penalties under the individual mandate that are lower than the going premiums, would lead to folks waiting until they got sick to buy insurance.

But that analogy is not quite apt. Mr. Cranick, who has learned an incredibly expensive lesson about risk, wasn’t offering to pay the $75 fee. He was offering to pay whatever it cost to put out the fire. If an uninsured man confronted with the pressing need for a heart transplant offered to pay a year in back-premiums to an insurer to cover the operation, you’d be right to laugh at him. But imagine if that man broke out his check book to pay for the whole shebang, and hospital administrators denied him the procedure to teach him a lesson.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/248649/firefighters-watch-home-burns-daniel-foster




Oh and this should make you feel special, your opinion is shared by a pretty nasty commentator. "Radio and TV talk show host Glenn Beck defended the fire department letting Cranick's home burn down." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39535911/ns/us_news-life