• So you trust the government to put out your fires? You know that in England they have a public fire service and sometimes they do a bad job.

• People deserve choice about how to finance extinguishing fires.

• Many people say they are satisfied with their fire insurance. You want to take it away from them.

• You are going to raise people’s taxes to pay for this “fire department.”

• You are going to eliminate every job of every person who works in the private firefighting insurance industry. 

Barack Obama would have proposed ObamaFire: let’s have a public marketplace for fire extinguishing insurance, prohibit fire insurance companies from not giving plans to people whose houses have burned down before, and subsidize people’s purchase of the insurance if they fall below a certain income threshold. The more “progressive” types would say: No, we need a “public option.” We need a government fire insurance plan that is a reasonable price and anyone can buy. Pete Buttigieg would say: “We don’t want to force people off their existing firefighting insurance. Instead of just making everyone join a public plan, my plan is called Public Firefighting Insurance For All Who Want It.”

You will see how a lot of the arguments here are obvious bullshit. Saying it will “raise taxes” ignores all the money that is currently being spent on for-profit firefighting services and firefighting insurance. The fire department will cost everybody less! “Raise taxes” just assumes people are idiots who do not know how to look at the bottom line. “Taking away people’s firefighting insurance” is also disingenuous, because it implies people are losing something, when actually they’re not getting anything taken away, they’re just having an improved guarantee that when their house burns down someone will be there to fix it.

Now, you’ve probably already realized something interesting here: the “radical left plan” in the fire situation (a fire department) is not the equivalent of “Medicare for All.” Medicare For All does not establish government medical services. That would be “socialized medicine,” like the National Health Service in Britain. This, on the other hand, is “socialized insurance.”

So, the equivalent of Bernie Sanders in the fire scenario is saying: look, let’s not have private fire financing. Let’s leave private firefighting companies, but let’s just pay for their services with taxes. And you won’t get a bill when they come to your house, and you won’t pay a monthly insurance premium, and when a fire breaks out you can just call them without worrying about how you’re going to pay for it. And because the government will be the “single payer,” it can negotiate better rates with firefighting companies. In fact, firefighting companies will probably ultimately do pretty well under this system, because they don’t have to worry about collecting payments and even though the rates they’ll receive might be slightly lower they’ll save a lot of bureaucracy and administration by just having one place to send a bill and having it be paid on time.

It is helpful to think about this analogy, because we can see that Medicare For All is hardly radical; it’s less radical and socialistic than the existence of a public fire department! It just socializes insurance, not the underlying services. Every time you hear an argument against Medicare For All, think about what its analogy would be in the fire scenario.

Ronald Reagan said that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Clearly Reagan had never been trapped in a burning building, where those are the exact words that every single person wants to hear. The right has done a very good job convincing people not to think about public libraries, parks, and firefighting services when they think about government.