What if the fuel you get is poisoning your water supply without your knowledge? Who would you go to in such a scenario and what would your proposed course of action would be ideal stop drinking water or stop heating and driving?
Your proposed solution is more anarchy than anything else and knowing mankind, we will end up killing ourselves, not the best solution and not evolutionary in its nature either.
Yup - the first few families would probably die. So would the next few families that tried to live in that area and drink that water. Eventually, people might figure out that drinking that water was not a good idea. They wouldn't live in that area or drink that water - or they would decide that getting the fuel from that source was less important than getting the water from that source.
What the people wouldn't do is expect someone else to "fix" the problem, while blindly believing that they can continue driving their cars and living wherever they want with no personal consequences. A little anarchy might be exactly what our species needs - before we evolve even farther into the Eloi & the Morlocks.
Here's a true story about the brilliant workings of our gov't...
Recently, the feds implemented a new program for Medicare reimbursement for oxygen therapy. The federal Medicare system is broken into 10 regions, with ~5 states per region. The new fed program is for "competitive bidding" within each region. Providers submitted bids to provide service in the region, and only a few providers would win the exclusive rights to provide service to medicare patients in that bidding area. Providers that do not win a spot have to either partner with one of the winners, or they are out of the oxygen business in that area.
OK - so, as you would expect, the bigger national providers are the only ones able to bid a low enough price to win a spot. So, the same companies were the winners in nearly all the regions that have completed their bid rounds. Region IV includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
So far, so good...
One of the really odd parts of Medicare is that although it is a Federal program, the individual states actually license the Medicare providers in their state. Apparently the Alabama state legislators were not happy that the local providers in their state didn't win any of the spots. I'm sure there was also lots of encouragement from lobbyists hired by the companies that didn't win a bid spot.
The result is that the Alabama legislature just passed a new law that requires companies seeking a medical device license to have a physical office in Alabama that is manned at least 30 hours a week, and has a phone number listed in the business section of the phone book and can be found by a caller that dials "411" for directory assistance for the location where the office is located. The rule specifically states that the local phone number must NOT be "primarily" a pager, cell phone, answering machine, answering service or a forwarded number, and the medical records for Medicare patients in Alabama must be available for inspection from within the Alabama location.
So, in order for the oxygen service provider to actually take advantage of wining the Federal bid, they now have to lease an office in Alabama and put an employee there 30 hours a week, and that employee needs to be available to answer the phone in case the Alabama inspectors want to drop by to inspect the medical records. They also need to have a network connection at the location with access to the patient records that are actually stored in a database on a server in a datacenter located thousands of miles away.
How stupid is this? The national oxygen service providers have been successfully servicing thousands of patients in Alabama for years without a physical location, but now, because Alabama is p!ssed off that a better business model is beating the inefficient local businesses, those national providers have to spend thousands of add'l dollars a month.
Alabama is actually not the only state with this rule - Tennessee, Hawaii and I think at least 1 or 2 states also do it. I happen to know that at least one of the national providers will only do cash sales in Hawaii because the population of medicare oxygen patients in Hawaii isn't enough to cover the high cost of an office there. How is that good for the patients requiring oxygen? It isn't. It's simply people with influence using our complicated laws and short-sighted gov't officials to perpetuate an inefficient system to benefit a small group at the detriment of the public.
This is similar to the situation that Tesla is fighting. The dinosaurs are trying to use lawyers to legislate that the mammals are being too successful...
And who the heck even uses "411" directory assistance anymore? :rolleyes:
