If you want medical care in a timely manner in Las Vegas, you must find a concierge doctor who is taking patients and pay $2000+ a year to be able to see the doctor and to be referred to specialists as needed.
Private schools have provided an escape hatch for parents fed up with poor quality government schooling. While the cost is considerable, parents make the sacrifice while still funding government schools with their tax dollars.
In Los Angeles, if you want your home or business protected from fires, you must hire concierge firefighters. Gary Baum wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “Such concierge-style protection first gained public notice after the Woolsey blaze in 2018, when TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had hired a private team to help save their Hidden Hills compound.”
Not just Hollywood’s elite are hiring private firefighters. Utility companies whose infrastructure requires careful upkeep and major insurers like AIG and Chubb, are calling on the services of private firefighters. Even government jurisdictions needing to supplement their fire departments, or lack thereof. Writes Baum:
According to The New York Times, fire crews can cost between $3,000 and $10,000 a day. The Hollywood Reporter has learned that the going rate per private firefighter is about $70 per hour, not including food and lodging.
As in the case of private schools, public sector firefighter unions take a dim view of private firefighters. “From the standpoint of first responders, they are not viewed as assets to be deployed,” tut-tutted Carroll Wills, a spokesperson for California Professional Firefighters, a labor union. “They’re viewed as a responsibility.”
Private contractors who work for owners of homes or private land comprise less than 1 percent of the private fire service industry, according to the National Wildfire Suppression Association. Some private firefighting companies contract with insurance carriers to protect properties, reports businessinsider.com.
This reminds us of Hans Hoppe’s case for insurance companies to provide national defense. “Within the framework of a complex modern economy based on worldwide division of labor, the most likely candidates to offer protection and defense services are insurance agencies,” Hoppe explained. “The better the protection of insured property, the lower are the damage claims and hence an insurer’s costs. Thus, to provide efficient protection appears to be in every insurer’s own financial interest.”
“You started seeing high-net-worth folks making phone calls,” Jess Wills, president of Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression, told BI, saying he doesn’t publicly advertise the service. “For us, what happens is, fires kick-off, and then people start just getting online, Googling, searching ‘private fire protection,’ and somehow we come up.”
Joe Torres, the founder of All Risk Shield, said he offers on-site protection as a small portion of his business with the most basic (preventive maintenance) costing $2,500 per year. There are two additional tiers that include on-site firefighting during a blaze.
Mr. Wills charges individuals a very similar rate to what the federal government pays — “for a three-person crew in California, he said his contracts with the federal government cost about $4,000 per day.”
“There’s no way for us as professional firefighters to vet their training, or their personal protective equipment,” Captain Dan Collins, a spokesperson for Cal Fire on the Palisades Fire told CalMatters.org.
Oh brother. There have been private firefighting companies since the 1700s.
Insurers’ use of private firefighters “started years ago with some of the high-net-worth insurance carriers, but it’s moved into the standard market as well,” said Janet Ruiz, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry association. “It is really part of the landscape now. And even average homeowners are really taking a look at their risk way more than they used to.”
