Unlike the raucous town hall meetings held across the country the past two months, the meeting between Congressman Steve Scalise, (R-1st District) and his Slidell constituents Monday night at the Slidell Junior High gymnasium was a low-key event with both sides agreeing on the issues.

Though Scalise said he wanted to talk to voters about any issue they were concerned about, most of the meeting was taken up with the proposed bills in Congress to change healthcare in America.

The crowd of about 100 clapped loudly when Scalise said he was opposed to HR 3000, which is the Democrats and President Obama’s version of healthcare reform. “There are many provisions in there that are detrimental to our economy,” Scalise told the audience.

He admitted that there are problems with the current healthcare system in the country, but doing what is proposed by HR3000 would create even more problems. He said the reform would only affect 10 million people who do not have health insurance, which means that 300 million people are satisfied with the plans they have.

“We must fix what is broken without breaking the items that are not broken,” the congressman said.

In order to really reform healthcare in the country, Scalise said the problems of rising medical costs and competition among insurance companies must be addressed. He said that an alternative healthcare bill, HR 3400 that he and 50 other congressmen are authoring takes care of the problems.

He said the current plan for a public option, that would have the government offer health insurance to people who can’t afford private policies would not foster competition at all, but drive companies out of business, and that would increase insurance premiums. Instead, HR3400 proposes to take down the barriers to other health insurance companies from working across state lines. That would bring in more companies to a state, increase competition and bring down insurance costs.

The other problem is skyrocketing healthcare, due to doctors’ fears of malpractice lawsuits. He proposes reforming the dollar amount of medical lawsuits. He claims that would save about $100 billion.

Finally, he said the legislation would give small businesses a chance to join a pool of businesses that would offer health insurance at affordable rates.