Please explain the benefits of Romney's economic plan.

Where I'm at we have a federal public healthcare system which everyone can access, and private healthcare system which people can pay for. The benefits of the private is a much quicker process from diagnosis to recovery and in better facilities. The public system, called Medicare, covers:

the full schedule fee for general practitioner services

85 per cent of the schedule fee for other out-of-hospital services

75 per cent of the schedule fee for in-hospital services.

What does it cost? There is a Medicare Levy equal to 1.5% of taxable income as part of the normal taxation system, and an additional 1% for earners above about $170k who might not have adopted private health care.

Obviously the government of the day wants more people in private health care to keep costs down in the public system, and to reduce delays in that public system, so we have the issue of private health insurance as a political issue... as each side might change the surcharge point, offer incentives or change private healthcare legislation to change percieved accessibility and perhaps even to shape actual uptake of private care. Most everyone doesnt understand it, including me, so its not a big issue here except the price of private keeps going up.... but the public system has been running good enough since 1975.

Wikipedia link for more info .

Here is something posted on: Libertarian (Facebook)

https://www.facebook.com/libertarian.party.politics

The common argument that a privatized fire department does not work since its involuntary and houses burn down because of it. I often here our current government fire department is better despite its monopoly on it. How do I argue that a free market fire department is better? Do I use a voluntirist approach?

ANSWER

First of all, it’s interesting that so many people always point to the argument of fire protection as a reason for big government when fire protection and police and roads together only account for an extremely tiny fraction of less than 1% of the entire spending by government.

This could indeed be one of the few areas where it does make more sense to have government involvement and personally I would be happy to have fire protection paid for by taxes continued particularly the if the other 98% or so of major waste was cut.
But, as with many things, there is indeed the ultimate solution of having less government. Many small towns in America today have volunteer fire departments which are very effective. I don’t see any reason to think that a larger city would have any less percentage of ready, willing, able and capable people ready to answer the call for service to their fellow citizen.

Let’s take one of our most complex and largest cities, New York City, as an example. It has extremely large fire department with tens of thousands of people and billions of dollars in budget a complex system including pension plans, administrators, doctors, psychologists advanced training advanced equipment and any number of other complexities. In an extreme example let’s suppose that there was no government fire department in New York. What would fill this void?

First, New York City has some of the most generous philanthropists in the world. One need only walk down Park Avenue and look at the massive donations to the to the art museums or attend a charity ball on any given night of the week to see the vast amounts of money that are given by New Yorkers love New York. In the extreme hypothetical example that there was no government paying for fire protection I think that the citizens would very quickly and ably rise to the occasion and a fire department very similar to what we have today would be created. Probably with a much smaller budget and a core group of several thousand fire chiefs captains trainers and administrators who would be paid and paid for by charitable donations from contributors supplemented by a very large volunteer force of well-trained and well-equipped New York citizen volunteer firefighters.

I would bet that if the New York City fire Department put out a call tomorrow for volunteer firefighters they would have 100,000 applications overnight and could pick the cream of the crop, probably several thousand who even have fire and EMS experience and run them through advanced training paid for by citizen donations. You could also further supplement this I having some kind of paid fire services and this is even done here in America.

Again this is extreme I certainly am not going to be jumping on soapboxes calling for the cutting of fire department budgets

---

there are literally hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars which are far more important to cut than this but it is a great example a great illustration that even something that is so needed and one of the best cases and most reasonable cases for government involvement in interference isn’t really as necessary as we might think when looking at the freedom-based alternatives.

And that post is another example of the way conservative fiscal policies work. They count on people being generous enough to donate to programs that are important to them. If having a fire department is important to you, then volunteer for it. If you have way more money than any human could possibly know what to do with, then start donating. But people start holding onto their money instead of giving it away because if they don't then it gets taken away anyway. Also, just as a side note, Libertarians are different than Republicans even though some of their policies are very similar. My parents are libertarians because they are unhappy with the social policies of the republican party. Mitt Romney was the republican candidate, but Gary Johnson was the libertarian candidate.

In regards to medicare/medicaid not everyone has access to it....as I said earlier, as a healthy, single, white male I don't qualify...if I had some sort of qualifying disorder, or had a child, or was a minority then I would have a better chance to qualify....we have policies in place that are meant to prevent discrimination, sadly though these same policies can create discrimination ....