Article “Because of Unpaid Fee, Firefighters Let House Burn” reports “A small rural community in western Tennessee is outraged and the fire chief is nursing a black eye after firefighters stood by and watched a mobile home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 municipal fee.
“South Fulton city firefighters — equipped with trucks, hoses and other firefighting equipment — didn’t intervene to save Gene Cranick’s doublewide trailer home when it caught fire last week. But they did arrive on the scene to protect the house of a neighbor, who had paid his fire subscription fee.
“’I just forgot to pay my $75,’ Cranick told ABC News. ‘I did it last year, the year before. … It slipped my mind’.” …
WATCHDOG: This would not have happened if the community had a “single payer system” as does most of the country whereby government pays for fire service through taxes. The lesson to be learned here is what we considered outrageous in a case of a house being allowed to burn down is little different from what happens every days when our health care system, also built on private insurance, allowed people to suffer and die for lack of coverage.
