Last week, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives cast its 37th vote to repeal, de-fund or dismantle the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.
The bill, which passed 229-195 along partisan lines, will do nothing to halt the forward progress of the landmark healthcare reform law and amounted to little more than allowing newly minted Republican lawmakers a chance to keep a campaign promise.
"We’ve got 70 new members who have not had the opportunity to vote on the president’s health care law. Frankly, they’ve been asking for an opportunity to vote on it, and we’re going to give it to them," House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters before the vote.
Letting new GOP members wet their beaks is part of the price Boehner paid to retain his speakership this winter, but its not a positive sign that the bid to repeal the medical device tax is moving any closer to fruition, even if there is significantly more momentum following the Senate’s mostly symbolic vote to repeal the tax.
Powerful conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation are pushing Republican lawmakers to focus their attention on passing bigger legislation that would "ruin the healthcare law’s implementation," according to a recent story in Roll Call.
Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America, a sister organization to the think tank, told the paper that they’re looking to support "legislation that strikes at the heart of the law rather than bills that would strike individual, unpopular provisions but allow the main part of the law to go forward."
This approach favors bolder actions, such as repealing funding for the Medicaid expansion, over spiking a specific provision of the law like the medical device tax, which could actually improve the public perception of Obamacare.
If this sounds familiar it’s because these are some of the same issues that held up the repeal vote last year when conservative members of the House didn’t want to pick and choose between repealing all of Obamacare or parts of it. Those hurdles were eventually cleared and the device tax got its vote last June.
Nonetheless a new bill to repeal the medical device tax, Rep. Erik Paulsen’s (R-Minn.) HR 523 Protect Medical Innovation Act of 2013, currently has 238 co-sponsors and is ready to pass anytime.
Unfortunately for the device industry, which is currently shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter to the IRS in excise tax payments, any disagreement among factions of the GOP over tactics will only end up costing more money in the end.
