A tax that’s a health risk - The Trentonian Opinion: Serving Trenton and surrounding communities. (trentonian.com)

A tax that’s a health risk - The Trentonian Opinion: Serving Trenton and surrounding communities. (trentonian.com): "ObamaCare promises to make medicine cheaper by making it costlier. Case in point: The Senate Finance Committee proposes a brand-new tax to be tacked onto the cost of 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 proposes to hike taxes on companies that generate health-advancing, life-saving mechanisms.

This Senate measure would slap a 10-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,” said Braun Medical CEO Carroll Neubauer.

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 — resources that fund the development of tomorrow’s life-saving devices.

The ObamaCare bill that recently came out of the committee “makes absolutely no sense and would be very damaging to Boston Scientific, and the medical device industry as a whole,” Boston Scientific CEO Ray Elliott said. “It would,” he added, “raise costs and lead to significant job losses.”"