Posted on 01/22/2013 7:37:38 AM PST by Kaslin
"Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt."
--William Cobbett
What is it with this administration -- a general envy and resentment of success ("You didn't build that!") or just a general incompetence at anything to do with basic economics? Like the old and bitter truth that the surest way to make something scarcer is to tax it.
The administration's latest victim is the American medical-device industry -- the people who make everything from body-scanning machines to catheters to glucose meters, anything regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Like pacemakers, defibrillators, artificial joints, heart stents, chemotherapy delivery systems. ... If a medical device helps folks, the tax on every sale just went up 2.3 percent.
Yes, this is another sales tax, not an income tax. Which means it'll ac tually take a much higher percentage of these companies' incomes. Which in turn means there'll be fewer new medical devices (it takes profits to finance research and development) and more pink slips. And soon enough, less revenue for the government itself as the whole industry shrinks, and taxable income with it.
Obamacare turns out to be the gift that just keeps on taking. And every new exaction always comes as a surprise to the unwary. Taxes that were just going to hit the very rich -- those envied and resented 1 percent -- have a way of hitting those who need help the most. Or just the 99 percent in general. (The payroll tax just went up by 2 percent for every American who draws a paycheck.)
This time the victims are those companies -- and their employees -- who make medical devices. The new, higher tax on sales of their life-saving products will mean more layoffs, more companies moving offshore, and more markets lost to foreign competitors. And this country's technological edge in producing new and innovative medical devices will be whittled away as their manufacturers have to cut back on their research and development.
This isn't the way our president talks during election years: "We've got a tax code that is encouraging flight of jobs and outsourcing. And that's why we've specifically recommended ... that Congress change our tax code so that we stop giving tax breaks to companies that are moving to Mexico and China and other places, and start putting those tax breaks into companies that are investing here in the United States."--Barack Obama, October 12, 2004. But it's not what the president says that hurts; it's what he does. Like pushing taxes that encourage job flight and outsourcing.
If there's a way to discourage invention and innovation, drive up costs, eliminate jobs, help foreign competitors at the expense of American businesses, and generally make this weak economic recovery even weaker, you can bet this president will find it.
And just wait till the feds get the final word on all these new state-federal health insurance exchanges. As when they decide which conditions to cover and which not. Call it a division of labor: The state can take the blame for anything that goes wrong with these hybrids of state and federal health insurance, while Washington can claim credit for anything that goes right.
This new tax on medical devices, which took effect as of the first of the year, is one of the endless provisions of the ironically titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Like so many of its other taxes, regulations and/or restrictions, this one isn't likely to protect patients or make medical care any more affordable.
Quite the contrary. Because it's a sure way to drive up the cost of everything in health care from artificial joints to kits that test blood-sugar.
The only discernible effect of this new tax on medical devices, as with so many new taxes, will be to increase their price and decrease their availability. By 2.3 percent. At least. So much for affordable care and patient protection. This administration seems to know as much about economics as it does about medicine -- just enough to be dangerous. There's nothing wrong with this president's imagination; it's his connection to economic reality that seems tenuous at best.
It's enough to make a body wonder if the masterminds who dreamed up this tax on medical devices have ever practiced medicine themselves, or started a company, or thought through these brainstorms before enacting them into law. The one law sure to apply in the case of this new tax is the law of unintended consequences, aka Murphy's Law. ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.")
The case for this latest tax on health care is another triumph of creative accounting, and another defeat for common sense. Since so much of Obamacare's small print has yet to be revealed, or even written, there's no telling how many more taxes, regulations and penalties are still in the works. Oh, joy. Nancy Pelosi did say we'd have to pass Obamacare before finding out what all is in it, and, boy, are we. Tax after tax after tax.
Think about what is going to happen to the cost of a CAT scan, PET, or MRI!!!
As much as I hate the idea of Oozocare and the taxes associated with it, I can’t fully buy into the scenario posed by Greenberg. Like it or not, the demand for health care in highly inelastic, which means the quantity demanded is very insensitive to price changes. If your doctor raises his fees by 10%, do you really go shopping for a cheaper doctor who operates out of his garage? If you need a heart transplant, do you really shop around for the cheapest doctor? I don’t think so. Same for the devices that support those doctors. My guess is that you and I will see this most of this tax passed onto us in the form of higher healthcare costs, but does that really come as a surprise? Obozo and all the other political hypocrites who signed the bill could care less about you or your economic situation. Like Pelosi was stupid enough to say prior to its passage: “This bill is too important to take the time to read it.” It sounded good to the 51% of economic freeloaders and, hence, was voted into law without even reading the bill. Idiots...Republicans and Democrats alike.
[Google "Liverpool pathway controversy" to get an idea how it works]
He wants to create a world where the real taxpayers and the middle class do not have any more wealth than his moocher-class followers.
If he can't drag the moochers up, and he knows he can't, he will drag others down to the moocher level.
And that is exactly what he is doing.
I work for a medical device design company in NC.
I havent had any new design work in 3 weeks and prior to that 1 design job in 2 months. My boss can’t keep paying me to sit on my butt and search the web, self training, etc. I fear the worst is around the corner for me!
Discussions of Obamacare often use cost as the measure of how the PCAA will be worse.
A more important criteria than the cost is availability and existence of product options and product improvement.
The cost of basic brown beans in a free market might be, say, $1.00, while the cost of brown beans in a highly regulated market might also be $1.00, or perhaps a little less, or perhaps a little more.
But in the mean time, yellow beans and purple beans and mixed-color beans and low-calorie beans and gluten-free beans and organic beans and polka-dot means will either become non-existent (because they were never developed) or unavailable in your store (because few growers grow them) and unaffordable (because of their limited supply and high demand).
I think somebody (perhaps Rush) rightly pointed out that Obamacare is forever going to freeze health care in the year 2012. Nobody will have any incentives to invest in moving technology or treatments beyond those that existed on the date of implementation.
This tax will not encourage the offshoring of medical device manufacture since the tax also applies to medical devices imported into the US for sale. Also the tax doesn't apply to devices manufactured for export so it won't affect a firm's competiveness in foreign markets.
Exactly right. To the communists in D.C. this isn’t about healthcare. It’s about “spreading the healthcare around” with the peons’ money. They don’t have to pay, you know. And when they got away with passing obamacare yet exempting themselves, that showed there’s not much time left for this nation.
was voted into law without even reading the bill. Idiots...Republicans and Democrats alike.”””
In my life, I have been lucky enough to know a couple of people who wre very fast readers & were able to retain information in an amazing manner.
I don’t think there is anyone alive who could read 2700 pages of Obamacare information in less than 6 hours to vote on it.
The real problem is that the Republicans rolled over and let the vote even happen, instead of rising up and demanding a minimum of time for a reading of that bill. They should be publically horsewhipped for being such cowards.
Pelosi should go to jail for her actions, IMO.
extract:
Because it’s a sure way to drive up the cost of everything in health care from artificial joints to kits that test blood-sugar.
extract:
Because it’s a sure way to drive up the cost of everything in health care from artificial joints to kits that test blood-sugar.
Here is something that the democrats, with the help of the Obama Media, have thrown down the memory hole:
When Obama was running for office in 2008 and the democrats were promising to pass a federal government healtcare plan, they promised that the plan for all Americans would be the same as the healthcare plan that congress and the senate have.
Of course once Obama was elected and the democrats won majorities in the house and senate, that is the last anyone heard of that promise.
With Obamacare we witnessed the future. Obama the strongman sees Congress as having only one occasional purpose. It is not to make law. It is to rubber-stamp his diktats and cloak them with legitimacy.
The democrats and the obama media aren’t the only ones throwing it down the memory hole. I never heard a lot of republicans bringing it up either.
This will give them an excuse to nationalize the manufacture of healthcare devices.
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