Hal Jordan favors repealing and replacing the Obama healthcare bill because it is so fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed by making a few minor changes.

For many years, the United States has enjoyed the best healthcare system in the world. Unfortunately, a combination of bad government regulations, frivolous lawsuits, and a lack of competition are reducing access to care and causing healthcare costs to skyrocket. Employers are asking their employees to contribute a much larger portion of their insurance premiums, if they are not forced to drop coverage altogether. Medical malpractice insurance rates are causing increasing numbers of specialists such as anesthesiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and obstetricians to leave the profession, fueling shortages of medical professionals in many states. Sadly, many of our best college students are turning away from medicine as a desirable career, especially general family practice.

One approach to addressing America’s healthcare crisis assumes that government-controlled health care is the only practical solution. This approach advocates a socialized system like we see in Europe and Canada, where the relationship between doctor and patient is replaced by bureaucrats who will control the delivery of care. In these systems, the taxpayers foot the bill for “free” universal healthcare.

Hal Jordan is against such an approach. Socialized medicine is known for delivering few medical innovations, poor quality, long waiting times and the rationing of care in ways that put patients at dire risk. Not surprisingly, the wealthy in Europe and Canada often come to the United States for care.

We need healthcare coverage that individuals and families can afford, own, and keep. Jordan supports individual choice and believes that Congress should allow the healthcare industry to operate like other free market service industries. Instead of forcing physicians and hospitals to be focused on government regulated prices and procedures, competition would encourage healthcare providers to innovate and reduce their prices. Laser eye surgery is a great example of competition at work.

Jordan favors the expansion of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). Rather than using costly insurance bureaucracies to pay for primary healthcare services, patients could instead pay doctors and hospitals directly from tax-deductible deposits made to their HSA. HSAs are savings accounts where the money rolls over from year-to-year and are portable – the coverage follows you even if you change jobs or retire.

Jordan strongly supports the Health Care Choice Act introduced by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, which would turn the health insurance market, currently a patchwork of state regulations, into a nationwide market. This increased competition would allow families to shop for health policies across state lines and choose from a wide variety of plans to fit their specific needs.

Another reason for the high cost of medical insurance is onerous state health insurance mandates. These mandates have increased the cost of basic health coverage by as much as 50 percent for some states, depending on the specific mandates. There are many hundreds of mandates which have created an inefficient and more costly healthcare market.

The Health Care Choice Act solves the state mandate problem by allowing Americans to purchase a basic, low-cost policy without hundreds of benefit mandates they don’t need. This proposal will help the uninsured find affordable health insurance, while also providing every American with better health insurance choices.