Mark Bonifacio, founder of the medical device contract manufacturer APEC and an industry consultant, said medtech companies shouldn’t be concerned about the medical device tax that’s part of the Affordable Care Act.
"The people who are saying that this [tax] is forcing all of our jobs offshore are full of horse hockey, because it doesn’t matter where you make the product," Bonifacio told PlasticsToday.com.
Although Bonifacio said he is not in favor of the tax, he tipped his hat to Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak, who chose to work within the new laws and didn’t totally back the anti-tax push by the lobby group AdvaMed.
Bonifacio, speaking at the MD&M East conference in Philadelphia this week, spoke out against excise tax naysayers harshly in his interview with PlasticsToday.
“You can make the product on the moon, [but] the device tax still has to be paid when it’s sold in the United States. Well, someone could say, ‘Well we have to make it in China to cover the cost of the tax.’ That to me is a lot of CEO hot air. The people who were laid off in the announcements made last December were going to get laid off anyway,” he told the website.
Medical device makers cut about 7,000 American jobs in 2012, representing about 1.6% of the industry’s total U.S. workforce. Some of the cuts include layoffs at Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX), St. Jude Medical (NYSE:STJ) and Stryker (NYSE:SYK), some of which were explicitly blamed on the medical device tax.
Bonifacio founded APEC, which he sold to Helix Medical in 2007. He now owns his own device consulting firm called Bonifacio Consulting Services and speaks regularly at industry events.
