J.C. Scott will have some big shoes to fill when he steps in as executive vice president and director of government affairs for the Advanced Medical Technology Assn., considering the last man to hold the job wound up as the top policy man for the Republican-controlled Congress.
Scott, whom AdvaMed hired away from the American Council of Life Insurers, is a Capitol Hill veteran, having cut his teeth on the Hill as deputy director for policy at the House Republican Conference and in a number of capacities for Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) before spending seven years at ACLI.
His predecessor, Brett Loper, left Advamed late last year to become the policy director for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Scott starts with AdvaMed April 11.
Scott told MassDevicethat his experience working on behalf of a major player in the financial services world will translate well into lobbying for the medical device industry.
He cited the multi-faced regulatory environment for the life insurance industry as a good primer for dealing with the medical device industry, because each is regulated at the state level.
“If you’re a national company operating in 50 states, then you have to deal with 50 regulators, often with different sets of requirements, different market conduct procedures,” Scott told us. “So we’ve dealt with challenges in trying to get better uniformity and trying to do some of it on the federal level in a way that doesn’t look too aggressive to our regulators at the state level.”
He also cited similarities between the FDA’s proposed changes to the 510(k) program and changes the life insurance industry is facing with the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Scott said the Dodd-Frank bill has the potential to pull some life insurance companies under the jurisdiction of the federal government and a new financial stability oversight council.
“It’s a challenging regulatory environment for the life insurance industry,” he said. “But at the end of the day for life insurance companies, one of the reasons they’re always pushing for greater uniformity of regulation is that they’re developing new twists on their financial products all the time and they want to get them into the marketplace on a national basis as quick as possible. That’s fairly similar to the medical device industry.”
The Pensacola, Fla., native also told us that he was quickly working on getting up to speed on the other issues facing the medical device industry, but that he has a couple of aces in the hole: Both his father and father-in-law are physicians.
