Democrats who rail against the influence of big business in politics are joining Republicans in their effort to kill a key portion of the Affordable Care Act, due to their support of the medical device industry.
Republicans have always sought ways of killing the medical device tax even attempting to kill it in order to avoid a government shutdown in 2013.
Under the current, partisan-driven budget impasse, repealing the medical device tax is one of the few ideas that significant numbers of Democrats and Republicans agree on. But many Democrats have stuck with the president in his insistence that any bills to reopen government and raise the debt ceiling be unencumbered by other legislation. The White House has called efforts to tie renewed government funding to a device tax repeal “blatant extortion.”
As the passage indicates, there are also Democrats who happen to represent states with huge concentrations of medical device companies that will kill this portion of the healthcare law to appease these companies. States like Massachusetts, which is home to the second largest concentration of medical device manufacturing in the United States.
USA Today submitted a brief yet quite informative article on this issue over the past few days:
The tax has been in effect since Jan. 1, 2013. It was written into the Affordable Care Act as part of the funding that now helps uninsured Americans get health coverage. Thanks to the law, medical device makers — along with hospitals, insurers and others — are getting millions of new customers and billions in new profits. It only seems fair that they should help offset the cost of the law.
But device makers are well funded and well placed to fight back. Over the past five years, the industry has spent nearly $150 million to lobby against the tax, including tens of millions in carefully targeted contributions to members of Congress.
Like big defense contractors, the medical device industry has companies all over the country. That helps explain why Democratic liberals such as Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, support repeal.
Ed Schultz devoted a
segment of his program yesterday to this issue and the efforts of Democrats to assist big business in killing this "pay for" provision in the Affordable Care Act.
Schultz:
The industry has spent nearly 200 million dollars lobbying Congress to get rid of this tax. If the medical device tax goes away, this will create a big hole in the funding in Obamacare and how this country is going to pay for it. But Republicans chip away, chip away, chip away, all they can to destroy this healthcare bill.
Schultz invited Wendell Potter, healthcare advocate and senior analyst at the Center for Public Integrity, to join in the discussion:
Schultz:
We’re talking about a 2.3 percent tax on an industry that makes billions of dollars. Can this tax be repealed and Obamacare survive?
Potter:
Obamacare would survive but it would be weakened. And keep in mind that this money goes to help to pay for the subsidies that millions of millions of Americans are now getting to help them afford insurance coverage. So, what we are talking about here are companies in my view that are really quite greedy.
They are getting new customers and people are finally able to get the care that they need because of Obamacare. They are able to get medical devices that they need, but these companies don’t want to share a penny of new revenue. They are getting billions of dollars in new revenues Ed and this would do significant damage to the law and to the ability of Americans to get coverage.
USA Today concurred:
The industry complains that the tax is an onerous job killer that drives manufacturing overseas and stifles innovation. None of those claims is true, according to a November analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
The 2.3% tax actually nets out to just 1.4% because companies can deduct the cost of paying it as a business expense. Further, roughly half the industry's output is exempt because the tax doesn't apply to exports or to retail medical devices such as eyeglasses and hearing aids.
What is the takeaway? Senators who rail against the forces of big business on one end of the spectrum are doing the bidding of big business to the detriment of poor and needy Americans, as it relates to their own neck of the woods.
Hypocrisy much?
I won’t even shake my head.