Right about this time last week, somewhere between the third slice of pumpkin pie and a turkey-induced coma, my mind drifted over some of the stories Medical Device Daily has covered in 2014 and all the things the med-tech industry should be grateful for this year. A surge in IPOs and an active M&A market were high on that list.
But Thanksgiving is over and my thoughts have turned to the gift-giving season. As I tell my six-year-old every time a new toy catches his eye, “ask Santa.” This year, as I helped my son compose his annual letter to the North Pole, I began to imagine what a holiday wish list for the medical device industry might look like.
1. Medical device tax repeal. Our resident expert in this area, Washington Editor Mark McCarty, recently put it this way during our morning staff meeting: “If you ask 10 different people, you’ll get five or so fairly distinct forecasts for the device tax repeal.” He explained that, assuming the tax will be repealed, there is still the question of how it would be repealed. Would it be a stand-alone piece of legislation, which Mark says would almost surely be vetoed, or would it be gift wrapped together with corporate tax reform (more on that in a moment). As Mark recently reported, AdvaMed has explicitly said it sees the device tax and corporate tax reform as two sides of the same coin. Others, like Joe Antos of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, say the device tax is a separate issue from corporate tax reform. Mark says it is tough to imagine that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would lobby for corporate tax reform if there is a risk that the device tax repeal might jeopardize corporate tax reform. Regardless of if or how the tax will be nixed in 2015, most in the industry have been against the device tax from the beginning. Thus, it is appropriate to put it at the top of our Med-tech wish list.
2. Corporate tax reform…READ THE REST HERE
