During this year’s gubernatorial primary race, it was our pleasure to meet with many individuals and small business leaders from across Montana.

Time after time, the number one issue that resonated with the citizens of Montana is the fear that over-regulation at the state and federal level is a job destroyer. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is the poster child of governmental overreach and overregulation.

In return for the promise of health insurance for all, the federal government grossly extended its ability to overregulate and manipulate everything from patients, doctors, hospitals and Insurance industry to student loans and religious liberty.

Four years ago, President Obama campaigned on a promise to create jobs and get our economy back on track. He failed.

Instead of focusing on the economy, the president led this country away from an opportunity to fix our nation’s economy and instead blazed a path toward socialized medicine and deficit-supported entitlements that future generations will never be able to pay back.  

Obama put his efforts into a 2,000-plus-page health care law that is suffocating the rebound of our economy.

In the last two years the president’s health care law has broken its promise of lowering insurance premiums. The average annual family insurance premium has increased by $2,000. When President Obama and Congress robbed Medicare of $500 billion to jump-start Obamacare, Medicare responded by introducing planned individual Medicare monthly premium increases of 250 percent by 2014.

What will Montanans who live solely on Social Security sacrifice in order to maintain their mandated health insurance?

Although the individual mandate has been determined to be constitutional, it forces citizens to buy government-mandated insurance from private companies.

The mandate forces young, healthy people to subsidize the health insurance of the old and sick. The mandate forces faith-based organizations to violate their constitutionally protected religious freedom. Our country needs health-care reform that is patient-centered, not centered on bureaucracy and coerced by mandates.

President Obama’s health care law was a bad idea before the Supreme Court ruled that parts of it are technically constitutional. It still is a bad idea. Now is the time for all Montanans to rally behind our state and national political candidates who when elected will terminate this flawed law and start anew.

Lynch and Olszewski ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for governor and lieutenant governor of Montana. Lynch is the former director of the Montana Department of Transportation. Dr. Olszewski is the president of Flathead Orthopedics and director of surgery at North Valley Hospital in Whitefish.