One of the more onerous provisions in Obamacare, a piece of legislation stuffed full of onerous provisions, is the tax of medical devices. Now it looks like that enough Senate Democrats support its repeal to get rid of it entirely.
The Washington Examiner reports that a repeal of the tax passed as part of an amendment in the Senate version of the budget bill. While the repeal is symbolic, it points to the likelihood that a real repeal will pass later this year.
The Medical Device Manufacturing Association notes that the tax takes 2.3 percent of a company’s revenue whether the company makes a profit or not. The MDMA claims that the tax will stifle innovation and job creation while severely impacting patient care. It calls for the total repeal of the tax. Now it looks like enough Senate Democrats are taking heed to cause a repeal to pass both houses of Congress.
Of course President Obama could choose to veto such a repeal which, while a politically unviable move, would be in character of a man who believes that his health care reform law is his signature achievement and must be defended in total to the death.
Mona Charon makes a note that opposition to Obamacare is building, with 54 percent of Americans believing that it will harm the health care system. While the conventional wisdom is that Obamacare is the law of the land, Obama won the election, and therefore opposition to the law is (for now) futile, the unpopularity of the health care reform measure points to a winning political issue for Republicans.
Since enough Democrats are seeing sense on the medical device tax to help kill it, there is no reason to suspect that they will not, in the fullness of time, see the virtue of dismantling other provisions of Obamacare as well. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas has filed a bill to totally repeal the law. A more likely scenario may be a death by a thousand cuts, with public outrage rising about this or that provision and with Congress reacting accordingly. By the time a new president is elected, all that may be necessary is to bury Obamacare’s corpse and then begin again, this time with a more free market reform
