MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Former President Bill Clinton spoke openly before an audience of healthcare stakeholders in Laguna Beach, Calif., this weekend, saying bluntly that efforts to repeal the medical device tax must come with a strategy to make up the lost funds.
"You’ve got medical device people, they hate the tax," Clinton said during the weekend’s Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit. "If you want to get rid of it you’ve got to say how you’d replace it."
Issues of a so-called "pay-for" have long plagued efforts to repeal the medical device tax, which was created under the Affordable Care Act to help fund healthcare reform.
Advocates of repeal have made significant headway on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have signed their names to measures that would repeal the tax, but Congress would have to find some means to make up for the $30 billion in revenue the medical device tax would generate. Previous pay-for proposals have rubbed Democrats the wrong way, and President Barack Obama has on more than 1 occasion promised to veto a device tax repeal bill should one land on his desk.
Clinton reiterated the need to make up for the medtech tax in speaking with Masimo (NSDQ:MASI) chairman & CEO Joe Kiani, who founded the Patient Safety Movement through the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation & Competition in Healthcare.
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