The Senate voted to kill the House amendments that would delay Obamacare and fund the government in a vote 54-46. Indiana is a good example of the division of the country on Obamacare, with the medical device excise tax at the heart of the matter. Both Sen. Dan Coats (R) and Sen. Joe Donnelly (D) […]
Medical device industry professionals have been asked to remember and apply that aphorism their grandmothers said about a little thank you going a long way in the campaign to kill the device tax. Though the Senate voted to repeal the medical device excise tax more than four months ago, last week, Joe Hage, the leader […]
Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken along with Rep. Erik Paulsen have championed the medical device industry, giving speech after speech and writing letter after letter to the Food and Drug Administration about upcoming changes to its 510(k) approval program. I doubted the campaign would do much. But Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 15 senators sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg urging her agency, among other things, to adopt a more deliberate, cautious approach to amending 510(k).
If you're banking your hopes on Minnesota's senators, think again. Perhaps Franken and Klobuchar can mitigate some of toughened regulations but there's only so much that they can do.
"Did you watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics?" Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) asked the mostly medical tech audience at a recent LifeScience Alley symposium on healthcare. "Did you see the 2,000 synchronized drummers?" I sure did. And like millions of other Americans, I thought: "Oh, crap. We're in trouble."
The healthcare reform law is indisputably an emotionally charged, complicated piece of legislation that can thwart even the best intellects and intentions. Just take LifeScience Alley's seminar on how the law will impact Minnesota's healthcare industry. By my last count, I witnessed an unfortunate analogy, two Freudian slips, and an ill conceived attempt at humor...I think.
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.
For a company that promises to "inform" consumers about the law, the letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota is awfully vague.
If the United States truly wants to boost the economy and narrow its ginormous trade deficit, then medical technology would seem like a good place to start. Minnesota’s bread-and-butter industry generated a $5.4 billion trade surplus last year, one of the few American industries to do so. Which is why Obama administration officials visited Medtronic […]
Minnesota’s medical device community has enlisted some big guns to lobby the Food and Drug Administration against proposed changes that the industry says will hurt innovation and the state’s economy: United States Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Congressman Erik Paulsen. In a letter to FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee […]
