How Obama/Biden Wrecked the U.S. Medical Device Industry

[Right_in_Virginia]

How Obama/Biden Wrecked the U.S. Medical Device Industry
American Thinker, Apr 27, 2020, Daniel John Sobieski

As part of the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act, sales of medical devices from implants to MRIs, research equipment and surgical instruments were to bear a 2.3 percent tax. The tax would be on gross sales and not just profits. Even packaging, shipping, and warranties were included when calculating what was to be taxed.

Because the Affordable Care Act was so unaffordable, it needed a running head start on revenue with imposition of the new tax beginning on January 1, 2013, while ObamaCare itself would begin a rolling implementation in 2014 with its more harmful aspects and the revelations that, no, you couldn’t keep your doctor or your plan even if you liked them. We would have to wait to find out that premiums would skyrocket, not decrease $2,500 as promised in another Obama/Biden lie, and deductibles would be so high that many of those with insurance couldn’t use it. Taxes first, questions later.

Health care equipment manufacturers were not amused and there were predictions that this onerous tax on medical devices would for makers overseas and into the welcoming arms of China. As Bill Flax wrote in Forbes in October 2012:

Cook Medical, America’s largest privately-owned medical device manufacturer has been adamant that shrinking margins may force investment overseas. “Cook will no longer be able to expand our manufacturing in the United States,” said company spokeswoman Allison Giles. “We’ve always resisted going abroad” but due to diminished returns “decisions will have to be made.”   

Cook scuttled plans for five additional plants across the Midwest. It expects the device tax could cost $30 million annually, roughly equivalent to constructing its new Canton, IL factory. Says the company, “that’s one less facility per year that we’re going to be able to use because of the tax.”

Apart from forcing companies to cancel expansion plans and/or move overseas, one immediate effect of the medical device tax was to destroy jobs in an industry belatedly considered as part of our national security in an age of China-spawned pandemics. It was put on hiatus in December 2015 due to its disastrous effects on the medical device industry. It was scheduled to return at the end of 2019 until  President Trump killed it, forcing it to be included in a  federal spending package that he signed into law last December. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce noted in February 2017:


More:  https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/how_obamabiden_wrecked_the_us_medical_device_industry.html

[Right_in_Virginia]

FTA

Do you all remember this thing called Obamacare? I’m sure you do. Do you remember the medical device tax that Obamacare instituted? Like all liberals, Obama believed that people that make things will pay anything. You put a tax on ’em, they’ll just keep paying the tax and they’ll just keep making the device. You put a tax on yachts, and people will pay the tax…

Well, guess what? The people that manufacture medical devices fled the USA, and they went overseas to various places to get ’em made. One of the places they went was China. They also went to Mexico. They went to places in Europe. And now people complain about a shortage. They want to chalk it up to somehow a fault or a deficiency of capitalism or of the United States. No siree, Bob. It was a by-product of a tax increase called Obamacare on medical devices.

[Cyber Liberty]

IIRC, "Band-Aids" were defined as "medical devices."