Massachusetts reverted back to its Democratic roots Tuesday in ousting Republican Senator Scott Brown from the seat he won when Ted Kennedy passed away.
While the state added more women to the ranks of the Senate by annointing his challenger, Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, Brown’s defeat may not be welcome news to the device industry.
The Republican senator, who tried so hard to distance himself from the extreme right wing of the party and even Mitt Romney, was an outspoken advocate of the device industry which employs thousands in the Bay state. Here’s a portion of a speech Brown gave urging the repeal of the medical device tax, on the Senate floor in July.
The new medical device tax imposed on the medical device industry is one more example of a policy that we all know is bad for jobs, and in fact, bad for your economy. The House has already voted to repeal this job killing tax, but I am disappointed to say that the Senate has not taken the time to work to repeal it in a truly bipartisan manner …. In Massachusetts we have over 400 medical device companies in our state employing tens of thousands of people. This 2.3 percent medical device tax on medical devices sales will cost our economy housands of jobs and limit Americans access to the most ground breaking, state of the art medical devices.”
Brown was named “Legislator of the Year” by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association in 2011 for his efforts to repeal the device tax.
During his heated battle to retain his Senate seat, Brown and his team attacked Warren for her support of the Affordable Care Act, which levied the 2.3 percent tax on the medical device industry. Warren’s press secretary Alethea Harney shot back:
“Elizabeth believes problems with the medical device tax can be fixed without cutting health care coverage for millions of people or forcing Americans to fight the whole health care battle all over again.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
A request for comment on how these problems can be solved is pending. Warren’s campaign website doesn’t seem to address the issue of 2.3 percent tax (a quick search using Google’s handy tip of using key words to search an entire site – “medical device tax site:elizabethwarren.com” – yielded nothing).
Her Harvard Law School page lists several issues in which Warren is an expert including medical debts and bankruptcy, healthcare economics, families in bankruptcy for medical reasons, small business failure and corporate reorganization among many others.
