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rick.merritt
Any reactions to the 2.3 percent medical devices tax?
resistion
Any doctor anywhere anytime - if this new electronic recordkeeping facilitates ...
Health care bill a mixed bag in U.S.
Rick Merritt
7/23/2010 2:03 PM EDT
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – The recent U.S. health care reform bill will be a mixed bag for makers of medical electronics devices and IT systems. More people will have health insurance and more doctors will install computer systems, but device makers are concerned the growing market won't offset a new tax and increasing risk factors are driving away venture investments.
Those were some of the conclusion from a panel of experts gathered at a Churchill Club event here Friday (July 23). "I have an ambivalent view of the bill," said David Gollaher, president of the California Healthcare Institute, non-profit group that promotes life sciences companies.
The will extend coverage to as many as 30 million of the 50 million uninsured in the U.S. However, "the bill never addressed the underlying structural problems and drivers [of high health care] costs, and those may have to be addressed in the next few years," Gollaher said.
Medical device companies are concerned about a 2.3 percent excise tax on their revenues starting in 2012, a measure designed to raise $40 billion to help pay for the bill. Drafters thought the tax would be offset by a growing market with more insured patients coming on line, but Thomas Novelli, (below) director of federal affairs at the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA) challenged that assumption.
"States like Massachusetts that already have universal health care coverage haven’t seen much of a [market] uptick," said Novelli.
"We had one member that makes external cardiac defibrillators ask how the bill benefits them," Novelli said. "We don’t think cases of sudden cardiac arrest will go up based on this legislation," he quipped.
The MDMA has several members with revenues of about $100 million a year that are still not profitable due to the high costs of bringing medical devices to market, he said. In addition, venture capitalists see the bill's complex provisions as another set of risk factors to weigh before investing in the sector, he added.
"The VC industry has stepped away from medical devices over the last 18 months," due to a variety of factors including the new bill, he said.
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rick.merritt
7/23/2010 2:41 PM EDT
How is the health care bill affecting you?
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Mark Wehrmeister
7/24/2010 11:38 PM EDT
The health care bill is clearly a boost for IT vendors providing electronic medical record software and for the service providers that help implement and support these systems. It will also benefit audit firms when standards for privacy and security are put in place for anyone storing electronic medical records. There will most certainly be standards like the PCI-DSS standards currently in place for the credit card industry. What other businesses stand to benefit from the health care bill?
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http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/poconoarmchairreview
7/25/2010 5:15 AM EDT
I can't imagine that the bill will accomplish its goals of increasing medical care while lowering costs, the way it's set up now. The true ways of accomplishing those goals are to increase supply and lower barriers to entry. An engineering example: I wanted to buy an EKG. Not so easy to do! I have to be an "authorized purchaser." So I bought a kit and built a rudimentary one. It's not rocket science, and it gave me a lot of information which made me into a smarter consumer of medical care. But government regulations say individuals can't be trusted to mess with forbidden knowledge.... Naturally, the price of such hard-to-get items is therefore high, but volume is low. Companies that produce such equipment may fear smaller margins, but volume, I suspect, would overcome smaller margins and push total return higher. (An example: if we cut the cost in half, but then sold 1000 times more units of product, we would make a lot more money.) But, I'm talking about diagnostic equipment, and you are talking about medical record keeping tools. Lowering barriers is still a good way to achieve higher acceptance rates and lower prices. For instance, sell systems that are driven by consumers, in that consumers carry the data that doctors generate, in a chip in their medical access card. Make the chips readable by consumers (with secure readers), sell the chips and readers directly to the consumers, reduce regulations surrounding the devices, and I expect there would be some pressure on physicians resulting from that to get on board. Patients will tend to migrate toward doctors who make life easier for them by adopting "their" system.
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resistion
7/25/2010 8:21 AM EDT
Any doctor anywhere anytime - if this new electronic recordkeeping facilitates that it will be a boon.
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rick.merritt
7/25/2010 10:41 AM EDT
Any reactions to the 2.3 percent medical devices tax?
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