[randallsquared]

Well, there's no limit to how much healthcare you can use, though. Hanson[1] suggests Americans already buy too much healthcare, and in the US, healthcare still costs most people something through copays, etc. So, I think it's quite arguable that giving people free healthcare can create bad incentives, if not limited some other way.

I also am not sure it makes sense to lump together healthcare (which includes a lot of long-term preventative care like vaccines and lifestyle advice) and fire protection (which is mostly emergency damage control). A better analogy might be if the government provided free fire insurance covering everything citizens own -- actually, the US does this sort of thing with hurricanes and floods, so there's a fairly exact analogy, and it seems clear that it does create bad incentives to build and rebuild in hurricane-prone and low-lying areas.

[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/CutMed.htm