Obamacare Will Kill Innovation, and People, Too

Do you remember hearing about the tax on medical device manufacturing included in Obamacare? It’s back in the news. Michelle Malkin has the scoop.

In typical Obama-transparent fashion, the Internal Revenue Service quietly released a complex thicket of medical device tax implementation rules in a Friday document dumpearlier this month. Barring congressional intervention, the medical device tax will go into full effect in 2013.

Cook Medical, which manufactures products for everything from endovascular therapy, critical care medicine and general surgery, to diagnostic and interventional procedures, to bioengineered tissue replacement and regeneration, gastroenterology and endoscopy procedures, urology, and obstetrics and gynecology, has called for the levy’s repeal. Cook Group chairman Stephen Ferguson noted the tax burden amounted to a whopping 55 percent of its profits.

“For a company like ours, which pays 35 percent of our net earnings in federal corporate taxes and another 4 to 5 percent in state and local corporate taxes, the excise tax translates to another payment that will consume 15 percent more of our earnings,” he estimated. “This creates tremendous pressure for us to move manufacturing to Europe and other parts of the world.” According to the trade publication Mass Device, the company has already canceled plans to build a new factory in the U.S. because of the Obamacare tax burden. (Read More)

So much for insourcing jobs.

The news doesn’t get much better from there. I’ve been so behind on everything this week I haven’t been reading the Wall Street Journal every morning like I normally do. Thanks to Don Surber for pointing this piece out on the Death Panels.

Offended by President Obama’s decision to force health insurers to pay for contraception and surgical sterilization? It gets worse: In the future, thanks to ObamaCare, the government will issue such health edicts on a routine basis—and largely insulated from public view. This goes beyond contraception to cancer screenings, the use of common drugs like aspirin, and much more.

Under ObamaCare, a single committee—the United States Preventative Services Task Force—is empowered to evaluate preventive health services and decide which will be covered by health-insurance plans.

The task force already rates services with letter grades of “A” through “D” (or “I,” if it has “insufficient evidence” to make a rating). But under ObamaCare, services rated “A” or “B”—such as colon cancer screening for adults aged 50-75—must be covered by health plans in full, without any co-pays. Many services that get “Cs” and “Ds”—such as screening for ovarian or testicular cancer—could get nixed from coverage entirely.

That’s because mandating coverage for all the “A” and “B” services will be very costly. In 2000, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the marginal cost of similar state insurance mandates was 5%-10% of total claims. Other estimates put the cost of mandates as high as 20% of premiums.

Health plans will inevitably choose to drop coverage for many services that don’t get a passing grade from the task force and therefore aren’t mandated. Insurance companies will need to conserve their premium money, which the government regulates, in order to spend it subsidizing those services that the task force requires them to cover in full. (Read More)

Okay, they don’t call them death panels, but that’s what they are. If you get sick once all of this is fully implemented, you better hope and pray it’s with a disease that the task force finds worthy of treatment.

Oh, and again, I remind you that the British Prime Minister is working like heck to privatize health care because they’ve learned the hard way what happens when the government takes control. Yet here we are, following in their footsteps on the path to destruction.

Tags: death panel, device, Don Surber, manufacturing, Michelle Malkin, obamacare, tax