The medical device tax has been in place now for more than 5 months, but that doesn’t mean device makers have given up on repeal. Industry advocates have taken to casting a wider net in calling for support for removing the tax.
In a blog written for The Hill‘s Healthwatch, industry lobbying group AdvaMed’s president & CEO Stephen Ubl called on "all healthcare stakeholders to join with the medical technology industry in fighting for repeal of this anti-patient, anti-job, anti-innovation tax."
"That is the best way to ensure no one has to absorb the tax’s negative impact," he added.
The tax has been blamed for layoffs in the medical device industry, cuts to companies’ R&D budgets and scrapped plans for U.S. manufacturing facilities, but perhaps among the tax’s most nefarious elements is its potential to raise prices for medical devices, or else force device makers to eat the cost of the tax without any benefit in return.
Some members of Congress and the Obama administration have said that the medical device tax represents the medtech industry’s responsibility to help support the Affordable Care Act and that healthcare reform will bring device makers a raft of new customers that will help offset the cost of the levy, but AdvaMed and other industry groups have maintained that those newly insured under so-called "Obamacare" are younger patients, not those that are usually in need of pacemakers, hip replacements and other high-value medical technologies.
"AdvaMed and its member companies support the repeal of this onerous tax. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have joined us in this effort because it is already substantially increasing costs to the device industry and harming its competitiveness," Ubl wrote in the Healthwatch blog, which is titled simply "Repeal the medical device tax."
