Price Recommends Washington Reforms

Uncertainty about taxes, health care reform and regulation are keeping businesses from expanding and from hiring new workers, said U.S. Rep. Tom Price, who represents Georgia’s 6th District, which includes Roswell and Alpharetta.

“For so many of you,” said Price. “Washington is obstructing what you are trying to do.”

Price, a Republican, spoke at the Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce during its Eggs & Enterprise Breakfast Tuesday morning at the . About 250 people, mainly business people, attended the event.

“If you don’t know, you can’t plan,” he said. “So, you just pull back, you wait.”

Price believes to ease uncertainty and get businesses going, the federal government should do three things. First, he recommended flattening and simplifying tax rates and also minimizing deductions.

“The rate you pay should be the same rate your competitors pay,” he said. “You need to keep more of what you earn.”

Second, “let’s stop the madness in regulations. We should have a moratorium on regulations.”

Third, he said health care should be fixed.

Price, previously an orthopedic surgeon with an office on Hembree Road, was a state senator before being elected to congress in November 2004.

He believes that with lower courts ruling both for and against the health care reform law passed in 2009, that the U.S. Supreme Court will make a decision on its constitutionality in the spring of 2012.

“I believe it is unconstitutional,” he said.

Improving the healthcare system can be done by using tax deductions and refundable credits, by covering pre-existing conditions and by putting Americans into insurance pools with millions of others and thereby spreading risk.

“We should say in law that healthcare decisions are between you, your family and your physician and no one else,” said Price.

Lawsuit abuse also drives up the cost of healthcare, he added.

“For the first time ever I hear the word that I am fearful for my country,” Price said. “That is not where we should be.”

He called the time we are in and the elections set for 2012 “a remarkably challenging and pivotal time in our nation’s history; 2012 is the most important election of our lifetime.”

The rancor in Washington is because the political parties “have diametrically opposed views of what this country should be. When you have diametrically opposed views, it looks pretty ugly.”