Pushers of Obamacare have a mantra: “Affordable health care.” But the current plans would tax medical devises such as pace makers, which will increase the cost of care! From a column at NRO byDeroy Murdock:
Obamacare promises to make medicine cheaper by making it costlier. Case in point: The Senate Finance Committee proposes a brand-new tax on medical devices. Manufacturers of pacemakers, stents, heart valves, artificial hips, motorized wheelchairs, and other therapeutic instruments may have lobbied this tax in half. But whether they endure the $40 billion now in the Finance Committee’s bill or a $20 billion backroom bargain, Obamacare foolishly would hike taxes on companies that generate health-advancing, life-saving mechanisms.This Senate measure would slap a ten-year, $4 billion annual tax on medical implements that retail for $100 or more. “The $4 billion excise tax works out to a surcharge equal to $11,000 per year for every American worker employed by our industry,” Braun Medical CEO Carroll Neubauer wrote in October 22’s Huffington Post.
This $4 billion yearly tax exceeds the industry’s $3.7 billion in venture-capital receipts for 2007 and is more than 40 percent of that year’s sector-wide research-and-development outlay of $9.6 billion. This tax approximates one-sixth of annual industry profits. How exactly will those who make hearing aids, extended-wear contact lenses, and more manufacture today’s products, pay current staffers, hire new employees, and invent tomorrow’s cures — all while this tax devours nearly 17 percent of profits?
Good question. Obamacare won’t make insurance more affordable, but more expensive. It will ration care by making many procedures more costly, and eventually, by bureaucratic fiat. It will stifle innovation and competition. But what it will also do is increase the power of government–which, it seems to me, is the primary point of the whole exercise.
November 2nd, 2009 | 2:12 pm
[...] here to read the rest: Obamacare: How is Taxing Medical Devises Going to Make Health Care … Posted in Art, Finance, Uncategorized | Tags: a-rest-home, Art, committee, [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 3:25 pm
[...] senate Finance Committee proposes a brand-new set on scrutiny devices. Originally posted here: Obamacare: How is Taxing Medical Devises Going to Make Health Care … Posted in Finance, Uncategorized | Tags: about-the-stimulus, and-other, artificial-hips, [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 7:51 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by J. Robert Howell, ContactLensDirectory. ContactLensDirectory said: Obamacare: How is Taxing Medical Devises Going to Make Health Care … http://bit.ly/4vcvAv [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 7:52 pm
That’s what I’ve been SAYING — the winners are going to be the insurance companies, just like with Hillarycare.
It’s curious to me that SHS and Michael Savage are neighbors and don’t seem to know each other, even though they’re on the same correct page.
November 2nd, 2009 | 8:06 pm
[...] wheelchairs, and another therapeutic instruments haw hit lobbied this … Read more here: Obamacare: How is Taxing Medical Devises Going to Make Health Care … Posted in Art, Finance, Uncategorized | Tags: a-brand-new-tax, and-other, Art, [...]
November 2nd, 2009 | 11:45 pm
Where the logic goes wrong is in presuming health insurance and private insurance companies to be good and/or necessary. They’re the PRECURSORS to “Obamacare” and they have to be gotten rid of. Obama sure isn’t going to get rid of them. If only somebody WOULD. The minute getting health care depends on ANYTHING (like having insurance) other than one’s own ability to pay for it, things are on the wrong track.
November 4th, 2009 | 12:46 am
And ANOTHER thing. What is this “health care” phrase anyway? It’s medicine, going to the doctor, even medical care — but “health care”? How did this stuff get to be ANYBODY’s business but one’s own? There shouldn’t be public discourse about it. Doctors shouldn’t be involved in societal issues. None of “health care” is a societal issue. What happened to privacy? Insurance companies is what. This whole HIPA thing is a symptom of how wacko things have gotten. Sure Obama wants “transparency.” No privacy for anybody. And all this has been building up at the same time as nothing in the human body is considered private any more either. It just all gets xrayed and scanned and sonogrammed and imaged, and there’s no privacy and sanctity even in the womb any more. Now when you go to the airport they may take a picture of you that goes right through your clothes. THIS is where “science” has gotten us. Human exceptionalism? The individual, nor the individual life, isn’t even considered exceptional or to have sanctity any more. But then neither are those of laboratory animals. If we don’t need them for food, just as other animals need other animals for food, we have no business touching them, and things have gotten to be the way they are because we haven’t respected them and left them alone. Now we don’t get respected and left alone either. Well it’s our own fault.
November 7th, 2009 | 6:38 pm
[...] Curious Incuriousity About Constitutionality of Forced Insurance Purchase; Obamacare: How is Taxing Medical Devices Going to Make Health Care More Affordable? …. [...]
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