By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 6, 2015
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A bill introduced in January by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has five Democratic co-sponsors, including the two liberal Democratic senators from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, as well as Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. The push has enjoyed bipartisan support from the beginning from lawmakers who think the tax has cost the country thousands of jobs in the medical device industry and is drying up resources for private research and development. "Both Republicans and Democrats understand how bad this tax really is and we owe it to the American people to ensure the development of life saving medical devices are not plagued by high costs that will, ultimately, be passed on to patients," Hatch said in January. The tax is supposed to help pay for ObamaCare, bringing upwards of $30 billion into the program over 10 years. It applies to all gross company sales of non-retail medical devices and supplies, from X-Ray equipment and MRI machines to bandages and surgical tools. Because it is a 2.3 percent tax on gross sales, the percentage it takes out of profits is much larger. The repeal push once had even liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on board when the Democrat-led Senate passed a non-binding budget amendment dealing with the issue in 2013. "When Congress taxes the sale of a specific product through an excise tax, as the Affordable Care Act does with medical devices, it too often disproportionately impacts the small companies with the narrowest financial margins and the broadest innovated potential," she said in 2013. It is not clear whether she is supporting Hatch's latest bill, given she has been a strong supporter of ObamaCare overall.Now I do think there's a possibility here that the Democrats are perpetrating a rope-a-dope. The reason the original ObamaCare vote was so close was that so many Democrats knew it was an unpopular proposal and they were terrified of voting for it. A lot of Democrats who were in electoral jeopardy got a pass from the leadership and from the White House for voting against it, but they made sure there were just barely enough votes to pass it. That could be the case here in the House. You've got your 280 votes, but you'll never get 281 because the leadership will make sure it holds the line and allows no more apostates to step forward. If you get a vote with every House member taking part, you'll need 291 votes to get a veto override, and in the Senate you'd need 67 votes. If the Republicans can't even get rid of this aspect of ObamaCare, I dont know what they think they can do unless and until they take the White House in 2017.
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