 |
| Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton |
CHICAGO--In a speech emphasizing the importance of compromise, likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that there may be room for that dirty word in Washington when it comes to repealing the 2.3% medical device tax. That is a key demand of Republicans, not to mention of the device industry.
"I'm well aware of your concerns about the 2.3% device tax, and I think you have an argument to make," she told AdvaMed CEO Stephen Ubl during her address at the association's annual med tech conference. "I think it [a decision] has to be made within the context of a larger set of issues that have been raised by the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act."
Clinton didn't take a clear position on the issue saying, "we have to look and see what are the pluses and minuses," and "I don't know what the right answer about the tax is."
AdvaMed has been a leading proponent of repealing the device tax, and Ubl stressed its impact on the industry during earlier remarks to the media, saying the excise tax had played out exactly as he had feared. He cited the difficulty that the Internal Revenue Service has had in administering the tax, which raised $913 million in the first half of 2013, or about 75% of what was expected.
The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the tax several times, but the initiative has died in the Senate, where it has never come up for a binding vote. However, in March 2013 the Senate voted a bipartisan 79-20 to repeal the tax in a non-binding resolution. This oddity is explained by the peculiar and toxic politics of the Affordable Care Act, which the device tax helps fund.
Clinton put up a full-throttled defense of the ACA during her speech, saying the industry will "reap the benefits of those millions of newly insured consumers entering the market for the first time, purchasing insurance, using services, and yes, of course, medical devices." In addition, she said the the law's incentivization of the quality of care as opposed to its quantity will benefit the med tech sector--although many conference panelists said the trend is toward lower-cost devices at the expense of quality ones when it comes to medical device reimbursement.
She also praised the device industry for its contributions to healthcare, saying, "I'm grateful for the many contributions your technology has made to the family and friends I care deeply about," including former President Bill Clinton, who had a quadruple bypass surgery in 2004.
In another industry-friendly punchline, she said, "I'm well aware from my time in the Senate that your industry sometimes faces onerous approval processes for new products." Adding that the underfunding of regulatory agencies is "particularly maddening when it's in America's interest--not just our health, but our economy--to move your innovations through processes as quickly as possible."
Overall, as the former secretary of state tailored themes like the importance of compromise and family values towards a healthcare setting--and spent a long time talking about her role in the decision to kill Osama Bin Laden--Clinton's remarks seemed like practice for her future campaign.