Medical Devices Hit With New Excise Tax to Pay for Obamacare

[syrakusos]

Cardiac pacemakers and cardiac stints, ultrasound and x-ray machines, surgical robots and surgical lasers, all of them and more are threatened by a new excise tax on gross sales. This is right out of Atlas Shrugged. Sure, Obamacare promises you a free pacemaker... but there aren't any...

"The medical device industry is being ravaged by unwise public policy, including a devastating 2.3% excise tax scheduled to go into effect on Jan 1 as part of ObamaCare. This tax is especially pernicious because it is assessed on sales, not profits. To put this in perspective, imagine that you’re a manufacturer of medical devices and had a profit of $100,000 on sales of $1 million after all your costs and expenses—everything from materials and labor to research. The excise tax would be $23,000, wiping out almost a quarter of your profits."

Read the entire Forbes article here.

Medical devices range from simple tongue depressors and bedpans to complex programmable pacemakers with micro-chip technology and laser surgical devices. In addition, medical devices include in vitro diagnostic products, such as general purpose lab equipment, reagents, and test kits, which may include monoclonal antibody technology. Certain electronic radiation emitting products with medical application and claims meet the definition of medical device. Examples include diagnostic ultrasound products, x-ray machines and medical lasers. FDA website here

[Acerbic_Critique]

I don't think it's correct to assume all people/corporations who/that make these devices would simply stop doing so because they'd possibly lose up to a close to a quarter of their gross profit. These devices are the means by which hospitals recoup monies lost on nonpaying/underpaying patients, by vastly overcharging for them. We've all heard the horror stories about twenty dollar boxes of tissues (which are now fifteen count boxes of the lowest grade paper legally labeled paper) and ten dollar tongue depressors. Unlike Ronald Reagan's 'Welfare Queens' these medical items truly do exist. What's more, the same box of tissues can be charged for over and over again if a patient does not take it home. Having worked in the hospital setting, I know all the tricks they use, because I worked in a 'magnet unit' a NICU. Our reason for being was not the humanitarian ideal of saving premature and critically ill newborns, it was to attract as many women to our hospital as possible to deliver healthy babies, on which hospitals make large amounts of money by delivering quickly and getting them out the door as soon as possible with as little 'real' nursing time as possible and by billing absolutely outrageous amounts of money for everything from 'available oxygen' which means there's a nozzle in the room, which was built in there, to fetal monitoring, which is almost never truly necessary, but done anyway.

Of course the doctors get in on the act with exams, done mostly by the nursing staff and reported to the doctor or his NNP unless there's a concern, to Neonatology consults which can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars if the Peds guy on call is afraid of newborns and prefers that the Neo be told by an RN that a baby had a fever, rash and feeding problems but the CBC with manual diff. was fine and she ordered one for the morning. MAJOR rip off and a terrible waste of resources! If people knew how much resource wasting went on in Neonatology or how much experimentation without informed consent is done by Neonatologists, they'd be OUTRAGED.

[syrakusos]

See my comments today in Dennis L. May's thread on "Consensus Science." Insurance long ago became a form of free market socialism and the government mandates and interventions only exacerbated the symptoms. That does not change the fact that the new tax is wrong. Thanks also for the link to Bourguereau. I have been a fan for about 20 years.

[Selene]

Ms. E:

Welcome to OL.

Sorry about your Packers.

Have you read much of Ayn's fiction? Non-fiction?

Thanks for your service.

A...