The government may have incentivized, but if the government incentivized sticking your hand into a running wood chipper, would you do it? Seriously, you guys are forgetting that these companies had time to adjust and change course, even when all economic logic was telling them it was a bad idea to go forward, and yet they did, the blame falls on their shoulders for making bad decisions.  Not to mention, that still doesn't address all the other factors that were involved that had nothing to do with the government.

Hopefully not. All I know in Canada is you need a health card, so you need to be a Canadian citizen. So no illegal immigrants getting health care here.

  I never said the government wasn't at fault, however there is a big difference between the blame the government bears and what the private lenders bear, you do something stupid and the government was incentivizing it, you still did something stupid.

But it wasn't a good investment, as the need for TARP proved,  without TARP most of those banks would be gone, so they didn't do their job, to protect their bottom line, yes it is the banks concern to worry about your ability, because they don't get repayed if you can't, actually the banks and other lending institutions deserve a good chunk of the blame, because of all those involved, they had the best information, and yet continued to make bad loans, that's not the government's fault.

I'd like to say no, but if the government incentivized sticking one's hand into a running wood chipper to the point that people did it on a daily basis and it became the industry standard, who fucking knows?

The combined effect of the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the FHA (expect a "Bailout" there pretty soon) and the treasury department was to eliminate the perceived risk to the banks. When you add to it the several bailouts that the banks have received since the crisis, it should be clear that there never was any risk to these banks and they’re protected from up high.

Why would any bank follow practical lending practices where their profits are their own, and their losses are yours to deal with?

Now, I'm not trying to let the banks off on their part to the problem (nor am I letting the bulk of home-buyers off for their part in the speculative home bubble) but without government involvement this simply couldn't have happened.

@Happy, Well that falls under TBTLF (too big to let fail), however even with that, many big financial institutions died, and others were gutted, and stockholders and investors were decimated, so even with the government protection a lot of these financial institutions suffered because of their bad practices, so its not like they got off without any problems.

So they still had a duty to their shareholders and investors to undertake better practices, and they failed to follow through.

The problem is that when the banks that are "Too Big To Fail" have no restrictions on lending practices because they're protected, the smaller banks have to make insane loans just to survive ... If the government wasn't playing around in the market this crisis would have never happened.

Big banks failed as well though, and a lost of small banks survived, and in many cases didn't need bailouts, so the argument that small banks had to make crazy loans and Big banks were protected isn't true, as for the government causing it, the thing is, the government only incentivized loans, the bad practices were the banks, the government created an environment where stupidity could occur it was the institutions and borrowers who provided the stupidity, then there were the other issues like new financial instruments and unregulated banking aspects that were drivers in the downturn, but where not the result of government action, not to mention the level of private debt and overleveraging.

we have to present our health cards before we can get service (which illegal residents cannot get)

i assume they could go to the emergency room though and still get seen.

The government created an environment in which such stupidity had to occur if, say, you wanted to open a new branch.