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Originally Posted by HailGreen28

Nevermind taxing and restricting something isn't going to "gain" anything in that field. Both links seem like more of a defense of the Fox story than a rebuttal.

Then you choose to see what you want to see. It's clearly not supporting some of the exaggerations that Fox was making, and it definitely doesn't "seem like more of a defense of the Fox story."

The spin is that there will be tremendous job loss and reduction in R&D despite the significant increase in numbers of people covered by healthcare in the United States.

Yet an analysis by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities takes a very different view. The Center is a think tank founded in 1981 to analyze federal budget priorities. It describes itself as nonpartisan, but it has a focus on fiscal policy and public programs that affect low- and moderate-income families and individuals. That probably constitutes a bias in today's red-hot partisan environment.

Tax Will Not Shift Employment Offshore

Despite claims to the contrary, the excise tax creates no incentive whatever for medical device manufacturers to move production overseas. The tax applies to imported as well as domestically produced devices. Thus, sales of medical devices in the United States will be equally subject to the tax whether they are produced here or abroad, and the tax will not make imported devices any more attractive to domestic purchasers.

In addition, devices produced in the United States for export are exempt from the tax, so it will not reduce the competitiveness of U.S.-made devices in international markets. Making a tax-free sale for export is straightforward, and the administrative burden of securing an exemption is small. The device manufacturer and the U.S. exporter will register with the IRS (foreign purchasers of articles for export need not register), and the U.S. exporter must simply provide its registration number to the manufacturer and certify that the devices will be exported.[9]

A much-cited 2011 study financed by AdvaMed, an industry trade association, alleges that the tax would cause 10 percent of device manufacturing to move offshore, leading to the loss of 43,000 U.S. jobs.[10] Analysis by Bloomberg Government, however, finds that the study “is not credible.” Its assumptions, Bloomberg concludes, “conflict with economic research, overstate companies’ incentives to move jobs offshore, and ignore the positive effect of new demand created by the [health reform] law.”[11]

Tax Will Have Little Effect on Innovation

The excise tax also will likely have very little effect on innovation in the medical device industry, despite claims to the contrary. The consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has identified five pillars of medical technology innovation: financial incentives, human and physical resources, a favorable regulatory climate, demanding and price-insensitive patients, and a supportive investment community.[19] Each pillar comprises more than a dozen separate factors, and the tax rate is just one of the many factors affecting financial incentives.
The rate of innovation in medical technology has slowed in recent years for reasons entirely unrelated to the excise tax. “Like Big Pharma, which introduced many ‘me too’ drugs,” writes The Economist, “device companies have sustained themselves by making small improvements to existing products. Spending on R&D has so far failed to yield many truly innovative devices.”

Health reform may well spur medical-device innovation by promoting more cost-effective ways of delivering care. As PricewaterhouseCoopers observes:

Government pressure to lower healthcare costs could . . . forc[e] developed nations to turn to innovative technology to achieve better results at lower costs. In the United States, for example, the [ACA] calls for reduced annual payment updates for most Medicare services, substantial cuts to managed care plan payments, and the creation of an Independent Payment Advisory Board. These are small steps in what will be a prolonged and complex effort by Western nations to rein in healthcare costs.[20]

Sure, the author from the first link does express some concern for small businesses.

All of that being said, there is room for improvement in how the medical device tax is assessed. Small companies that are often engines for important innovations need more protection from the tax. Any potential impact of the tax on R&D in the United States needs to be rethought and changed. Medical innovation is a powerful resource of the United States and a growing pillar of our economy.