Ind co. drops expansion plans because of obamacare.

[powderman]

Indiana company scraps plans for expansion over ObamaCare device tax  By Judson Berger
Published July 27, 2012
FoxNews.com     

•    A patient is put through a cat scan machine in Kingston, N.Y. (AP)

  An Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer says it's scrapping plans to open five new plants in the coming years because of a looming tax tied to President Obama's health care overhaul law.
Cook Medical claims the tax on medical devices, set to take effect next year, will cost the company roughly $20 million a year, cutting into money that would otherwise go toward expanding into new facilities over the next five years.
"This is the equivalent of about a plant a year that we're not going to be able to build," a company spokesman told FoxNews.com.
He said the original plan was to build factories in "hard-pressed" Midwestern communities, each employing up to 300 people. But those factories cost roughly the same amount as the projected cost of the new tax.
"In reality, we're not looking at the U.S. to build factories anymore as long as this tax is in place. We can't, to be competitive," he said.
Company executive Pete Yonkman first revealed the scuttled plans in an interview with the Indianapolis Business Journal. The company later confirmed the decision to FoxNews.com.
The Affordable Care Act imposed a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices beginning in 2013. It is projected raise nearly $30 billion over the next decade.
But the Cook Medical spokesman said the impact is greater than just a 2.3 percent uptick in taxes. He said the impact on actual earnings is another 15 percent, and he projected the company's total tax burden next year will rise to over 50 percent.
Republicans and medical device makers have been railing against the tax all along, with the GOP-controlled House approving a bill last month to repeal it. The Senate, though, hasn't taken it up.
A recent study by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, though, said the complaints by the industry are exaggerated.
"The tax will not cause manufacturers to shift production overseas.  The tax applies equally to imported and domestically produced devices, and devices produced in the United States for export are tax-exempt," the study said. It also said repealing the tax would "undercut health reform" by requiring Congress to offset the repeal by potentially killing spending provisions in the law and by potentially encouraging similar repeals.
Cook Medical is part of a family of companies that produce medical devices for surgery, obstetrics, gynecology and other fields.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/27/indiana-company-scraps-plans-for-expansion-over-obamacare-device-tax/#ixzz21sxuctG2

[Needles]

If 2.3% of the manufacturers' profits are over $20 million a year, what he's admitting to is the grossly exaggerated markup on medical devices that are indicative of what's wrong with letting capitalists regulate themselves. I used to work for a mega corporation that made communications equipment. Back then, a handi talkie police radio cost $600-800 unless you got a really fancy one. That was pretty steep. They also made a radio EKG unit for ambulances, which basically converted the EKG strips into subaudible tones and sent them to the docs in the local ER. THAT piece of equipment sold for over $3000. Open the case, and, guess what? The same police handi talkie was mounted inside with a voltage converter so it would run off the 12 VDC from the ambulance. Today, a bag (1 liter) of normal saline (.9% sterile salt water) costs the hospital about $900. Guess what it costs the patient? Any way you look at it, the markup on medical supplies shows that capitalists will take every opportunity to make as much money as they can squeeze out of the consumer as they possibly can. It's immoral. It's wrong. ALL medical expenses should be on a not-for-profit basis. 62% of all bankruptcies in the US are due to medical expenses. You cannot tell me that the maker of those CT scanners cannot live on the rest of the $870 million he's apparently making every year.

Since that manufacturer is obviously already independently wealthy several times over, he's just making a political statement for the benefit of the right wing propaganda organization knows as FauxNews.

[Junior1942]

A BIG +1 to what Needles said!!

[powderman]

Obummer knew his obamacare would cost America a lot of jobs creating more hardships for workers and companies. Like some of you say, YEP, his plan is working, for HIM, but against America, just as he had planned. POWDERMAN. 

[Needles]

Y'all are missing the point: the whole purpose of the health care law is to get the big corporations OUT of health care.

[twoshooter]

Unfortunately, in order for equipment to be made, so will profit. I understand and agree that steps are going to have to be taken to seriously lower cost or the market will be so over priced as to be useless. As it is, medical cost and insurance is virtual extortion, just a modified version of "your money or your life".  Competition is pretty much worthless in medical procedures also, when you grab your chest and hit the floor you dont have a lot of time to shop around, and when they show you your wifes MRI with the brain tumor they are going after and ask do you want to spend 82,000$ on Dr Williams, or do we get "Thumbs", he will do it for 47,995$, Who you gonna call The fact is, people today dont just want profit, they insist on MAXIMUM profit. Which means they will pay to import hot Russian girls to sell sex in a warehouse or take Jerry Sandusky to Thailand to meet new little friends rather than invest in a company making rubber gloves and hospital gowns. Of course they use "brokers" so they dont have to actually know or think about what they are investing in, they just need a report that shows them the bottom line. Ergo- the $20 aspirin . That is why EVERYONE has to have skin in the game, like a boat that is sinking, everyone bails or they are thrown overboard.

[Needles]

Removed by Moderator.

If 60% of their "breakthroughs" didn't kill people instead of helping them, you might be right.

[billy_56081]

TM now now that 60 percent claim is as unfounded as all else you blather.

[Needles]

TM now now that 60 percent claim is as unfounded as all else you blather.

Tell that to someone who has not worked in health care for 20 years.  You should probably also know that our "best MDs in the world" kill 150-200 thousand patients a year. That's just the ones who are killed by physician error, the ones they can't hide. By the way, the annual kill rate for MDs in the US is usually 6 to 9 times the total number of gunshot deaths per year. That's ALL gunshot deaths, including murders, suicides, criminals shot by cops, and accidents.

I used to do clinical research, and I'm telling you, these great, innovative drug companies cause a lot more deaths than what you hear about. My favorite tactic is when a patient begins to go south on a drug study, that patient is removed from the study. That's so, when the patient dies, they can claim it was not due to the experimental drug they gave him. Another thing--- most 'new' drugs are not new at all; they are failed drugs that were dropped from previous studies because they were too dangerous to use. So, the companies look at the side effects of those drugs, and try them again, to see if the side effects can be used to treat something else.  They just reduce the dosage and hope the drug does not kill as many people this time. So, when drug companies say they have to charge so much for a new drug because of the development costs, at least half the time they're lying: the drug is not new, it was already "developed," and the patients on drug trials sign away their rights to sue anyway. So, yeah, if you think I'm "blathering" just go on and sign up for all the drug tests you want.