It’s not often I agree with the Center for American Progress, mainly because I don’t agree their goals represent “progress.” However, on this issue my first hand experience with the indifference toward the cost of a medical device tells me they have a valid point. My wife had the rental use of a wound vac machine for a wound the size of a quarter. The cost for six weeks use was over $5,000 with a couple of thousand more for supplies. At the end of use the machine was returned to be used again by someone else. If the manufacturers seek to recover this tax in the prices of their equipment, it will end up being a tax on us and as this article points out, we won’t even know it.
You may not like Obamacare, but read this full article and draw your own opinion on this issue.
WASHINGTON — IN the last few days of negotiations in Congress, repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s tax on medical devices emerged as a key Republican demand. The medical-device industry waged an intense lobbying campaign — even garnering the support of many Democrats who favored the law — arguing that the tax would stifle innovation and increase health care costs.
This argument is doubly disingenuous. Not only can the medical-device industry easily afford the tax without compromising innovation, but the industry’s enormous profits are a result of anticompetitive practices that themselves drive up medical-device costs unnecessarily. The tax is a distraction from reforms to the industry that are urgently needed to lower health care costs.
The medical-device industry faces virtually no price competition. Because of confidentiality agreements that manufacturers require hospitals to sign, the prices of the devices are cloaked in secrecy. This lack of transparency impedes hospitals from sharing price information and thus knowing whether they are getting a good deal.
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No problem if you want to finance this fiasco of vote buying (either side of this argument) With your dollars. me, all i ask is that you let me out. with respect to your experience, the tax on that device won’t be paid by you – as medicare is lowering not raising reimbursements. i get to pay for mine, and yours, and all who are on medicaid. When they fail to raise reimbursement rates in Medicaid and Medicare, the new tax is shifted to those whose coverage is not protected by government rate setting.
I would prefer you leave me out… Oh wait, no can do because all power now emanates from the beltway.
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