The Patriot Post® · Obama's Medical Devices Tax May Be Harmful to Your Health

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared in The Washington Times.

With the start of the New Year, one of the little noticed but potentially harmful features of Obamacare has now gone into effect. It is the tax on medical device manufacturers. The new tax of 2.3 percent is placed on the revenues of companies that produce medical devices such as heart valves, insulin pumps, and hundreds of thousands of carefully engineered and regularly improved testing, diagnostic, and treatment products that make modern medicine in the United States the envy of the world.

“Medical devices” are a central part of routine daily medical care. Anyone visiting the emergency room with a child or grandchild dehydrated by a bout with the flu will find that the treatment of that relatively common, uncomplicated medical problem is dependent upon a bevy of “medical devices,” from the stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff to the intravenous-drip monitor. Of course, the more serious the malady, the greater the likelihood that physicians and nurses will be dependent on medical devices – MRIs, various scans, and x-ray machines, to name a few.

Will taxing companies that develop and manufacture these urgently demanded devices thwart their production? Without a doubt! The adage is true that if you want less of something, tax it. How will the tax affect the medical devices industry and thus the health of all of us?

First, as Hoover Institution fellow Henry I. Miller notes, the “tax is especially pernicious because it is assessed on sales, not profits.” For instance, if a small firm is developing a new medical device, it is not uncommon for that firm to receive sales revenues of, say, $2 million in the first year of sales, but to have only made an actual profit on those sales of $75,000 after research and development costs are taken into account. However, because the medical devices tax is applied to sales, it imposes a tax of $46,000 (2.3 percent of $2 million). That means that the tax confiscates over 60 percent of the net profits on that device. So the company’s capital is siphoned off by the federal government and therefore cannot be ploughed back into more research and development. The Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA) predicts (understandably) that product innovation will be “stifled” by the tax.

In addition, a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study released last August shows that investors, in anticipation of the burdensome tax, are already diverting investment dollars away from biotechnology and medical devices. As reported by Elizabeth McDonald, capital funding for the medical device industry during the third quarter of 2012 reached the lowest level since 2004. Investors are looking for profits and growth, both of which are made less likely by the Obamacare tax.

But that isn’t the end of the story. There are still more negative impacts for medical device manufacturers. Reporter Mary Katherine Ham notes an Indiana-based company that has cancelled plant expansion plans in anticipation of the ominous impact of the devices tax. Ham also points to Abiomed, a Massachusetts company producing heart pumps, which will have an amount equal to 15 percent of its research and development monies taxed away as a result of the new tax. Medical devices companies are also cutting the number of employees. Congressman Bob Latta (R-Ohio) refers to a Reuters report that shows medical technology companies already cut 7,000 U.S. jobs, and that, moreover, a survey by AdvaMed indicates that 62 percent of companies surveyed intend to cut jobs as one way to offset the effects of the tax. Even if companies have enough confidence in their markets that they try to pass along the tax to their customers, this will produce a further ballooning of the cost of health care – not a reduction, as President Obama has promised.

Why was the tax implemented if it has so many drawbacks? Simply put, the tax is necessary to pay for the increased cost of the Obama-devised healthcare system. One cannot add millions of persons to the “medical rolls” without finding some means of financing those increased costs. The medical devices tax is one of the ways of doing that.

Let’s be absolutely clear: The tax is not just a matter of reduced profits, financial worries, or loss of employment in the medical devices industry. What happens when manufacturers are subjected to increased taxation as burdensome as this, is that life-saving or life-enhancing appliances that would have been available to patients are not produced at all or their production is delayed. This is an unseen cost of the tax which takes the form of increased human suffering by countless patients spread across the country. Sadly for Americans, the proponents of Obamacare – in their rush to reach the goal of improved healthcare – have actually diminished health and wellbeing.

Dr. John A. Sparks is dean of the A. J. Calderwood School of Arts & Letters at Grove City College (Grove City, PA) where he teaches constitutional law and business law. A graduate of Grove City College and the University of Michigan Law School, he is a practicing member of the State Bar of Pennsylvania, a member of the State Bars of Michigan and Ohio, and a fellow with The Center for Vision & Values.