MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Medical device industry takes health law tax fight to IRS. The medical device industry has been lobbying members of Congress for a repeal of the 2.3 percent excise tax on all devices that was included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
There are currently five bills working their way through the legislature that would overturn the tax, but because the device industry has no guarantee that one of the measures will become law, it recently expanded its campaign to the Internal Revenue Service, looking for exemptions on certain devices.
The health care reform law stipulates that exemptions should be limited to items widely purchased by the public from retailers, but the IRS is still writing rules for which products are taxable, reports iWatch News.
Several companies and industry councils provided their input in the public comment website provided by the IRS for device tax rulemaking. DJO Global Inc., the largest U.S. supplier of orthopedic devices, asked the agency for an exemption on all items classified by Medicare as durable medical equipment, prosthetics and orthotics, including bone-growth stimulators and electrotherapy devices. The American Association for Home Care, which represents the home medical care industry, wrote that it believes all durable medical equipment, including complex power wheel chairs, should be exempt, according to iWatch News.
The medical device lobby and its component industries are considering several approaches to dealing with the excise tax. How the IRS determines the definition of “manufacturer,” for instance, could have a profound effect on the medical device industry if contract and component manufacturers are subject to the medical device excise tax contained in the health care reform law.
Medical board forces doc with most spinal surgeries to get prior approval for procedures. The Oregon Medical Board forced a Portland neurosurgeon to seek approval from a board-approved mentor before doing any more surgeries. The board’s move follows a March 29 article in The Wall Street Journal that identified Dr. Vishal James Makker as having the highest rate of multiple spinal-fusion surgeries among 3,407 surgeons who performed the procedure on 20 or more Medicare patients in 2008 and 2009, according to WSJ. The board’s actions are temporary and pending an investigation of Makker.
Supreme court delays Virginia’s health law repeal action. The Supreme Court was scheduled to discuss Virginia’s petition to have its suit against the PPACA on Friday, April 15 and issue a decision on whether to hear the case directly on Monday, April 18, but that Monday came and went without a decision. Now the case has been relisted on the court’s docket for Friday, April 22. The new dates mean a decision could be announced the following Monday, writes The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Studies fault off label use of clot drug. The use of the FDA-approved Novo Nordisk A/S drug NovoSeven for hemophilia has soared in hospitals in the U.S. in the last decade, but nearly all of the growth has come from off label treatment of medical conditions, researchers at Stanford University and their collaborators said. Between 2000 and 2008, the researchers found that NovoSeven’s use in hospitals to prevent bleeding in patients undergoing heart surgery or suffering from trauma or bleeding strokes soared 140-fold, reports WSJ.
R.I.P. Cook Medical founder William Cook. Cook Group Inc. founder Bill Cook passed away on April 15 of heart failure. He was 80. He started with $1,500 in capital and left behind a fortune Forbes estimates is worth $3.1 billion, a medical device company that employs 10,000 people, writes Forbes. The company plans to hold a public viewing for Cook at its headquarters in Bloomington, Ind. on April 23 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.