After Johnson said that there has been massive consolidation under Obamacare, host Jake Tapper asked, “There was a time when the United States government broke up AT&T as a monopoly. Because — do you think that that should be done for some of these consolidated health organizations because their consolidation, as you say, has reduced competition and increased prices?”

Johnson answered, “Yes, I think we have to do that. Jake, there’s not one incentive in our current system driving costs down, every incentive — because everybody’s getting a cut — let’s say, if you’re a realtor, you’d rather get your 7% commission on a million-dollar house, as opposed to a hundred thousand-dollar house. Same dynamic’s occurring in health care, so there’s no incentive. And you add to that the consolidation of these industries, these, basically, monopolies. And then, also, they realize that consumers aren’t participating. We have to pay insurance, we have to pay our taxes, but we could[n’t] care less, because nobody knows what anything costs. The doctors don’t, the nurses don’t, the patients don’t, just the bean counters. So, it’s a completely broken system. We need to bring free market competition, consumerism back, which is really what the Republicans are trying to do. We’re trying to fund HSA accounts. We’re trying to bring consumerism back, so we have consumers worried about what a doctor’s visit costs, what a procedure costs, have insurance for the high-cost surgeries, that type of thing. That’s what insurance is meant to be, not first-dollar coverage. But we’ve shifted to this third-party payer system. It’s a disaster. We need to return to, again, patients paying more for things. You do that by funding HSA accounts and having — just getting rid of the faulty design of Obamacare.”

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