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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Obamacare’s Medical-Device Tax

Higher taxes, lower research spending, and pink slips for scientists.

Obamacare promises to make medicine cheaper by making it costlier. Case in point: The Senate Finance Committee proposes a brand-new tax on medical devices.

Manufacturers of pacemakers, stents, heart valves, artificial hips, motorized wheelchairs, and other therapeutic instruments may have lobbied this tax in half. But whether they endure the $40 billion now in the Finance Committee’s bill or a $20 billion backroom bargain, Obamacare foolishly would hike taxes on companies that generate health-advancing, life-saving mechanisms.

This Senate measure would slap a ten-year, $4 billion annual tax on medical implements that retail for $100 or more. “The $4 billion excise tax works out to a surcharge equal to $11,000 per year for every American worker employed by our industry,” Braun Medical CEO Carroll Neubauer wrote in October 22’s Huffington Post.

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