"If the best practice for a merchant is to suspend an account when someone doesn't pay"

no it's not!!!

i prefer that my credit card stays active if i'm late. I prefer that my health care is active if my payment is late. I love that my cell phone is reachable if i miss my bill.

Stop making excuses. 99.9% of the time, i don't want the merchant to cancel services if i miss a payment.

Simply stopping payment is a bullshit way to indicate you want to stop paying for a service.

This is hacker news. Thing about building a system where you had to account for people breaking a contract every time they wanted to cancel service. That's an edge case and shouldn't be encouraged.