The
ongoing battle to repeal the medical device tax continues with the latest
campaign being led by House GOP freshman Todd Rokita from Indiana.
Rokita, along with 74 co-signors sent a
letterMonday to Speaker John Boehner asking him to bring a bill to the floor
that would essentially kill the $2.2 billion annual tax to be paid by the
device industry starting next year.
Whether it will be an effective strategy
remains to be seen.
But the letter appears to link some
hard-to-connect dots. It specifically refers to a study called ’Employment
Effects of the New Excise Tax on the Medical Device Industry,’ by Hudson
Institute senior fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Hudson Institute senior
fellow Harold Furchtgott-Roth. The study concludes that “device manufacturers
will be more likely to close plants in the U.S. and replace them with plants in
foreign countries” if the tax is implemented.
That seems to be a stretch.
Medical device manufacturers have had
operations in the Asian nation of Japan for years. No one claimed that jobs
were being lost here then. And now medical device manufacturers are ramping up
their presence in Asia and other international markets, while slowing down in
the U.S. precisely because they are smart business people.
All they have to do each quarter is to take a
look at their international sales figure and see how the demand from countries
like China, India and Brazil are far outstripping demand in the U.S. No wonder
CEOs of major companies like Medtronic and Boston Scientific have a new mantra:
Go East.
To suggest that the burden of the device tax
is leading them to do this is naive at best, disingenuous at worst.
A successful medical device entrepreneur used
that very term – disingenuous – to describeStryker’s claim that it is laying
off 5 percent of its workforce and reducing its operating budget by $100
million because of the medical device tax. (The GOP letter also alludes to
Stryker.)
But he had this to say about the medical
device tax: “You tax something you want less of.”
That sounds reasonable and will likely happen,
but it may be hard to measure in the stark terms the device industry and some
politicians would have people believe.
Arundhati Parmar
MediCity
Business & Investment Opportunities
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