The Week Just Passed: Repealing the Medical Device Tax

Rodney Leads Energy and Water Development bill through House

CBO Paints a Bleak Fiscal and Economic Picture

Rodney on Picatinny Small Business Symposium: “Valuable”

Town Hall Meetings: Listening Tour Continues

 

The Week Just Passed: Repealing the Medical Device Tax

“In Congress, as in life, the chance to start over and ‘get things right’ is often extremely rare. But when it comes to our health care system, the U.S. Supreme Court may provide the House, the Senate and the President an opening to do just that.

“The Court is expected to hand down a decision shortly on a challenge to the constitutionality of the President’s two year old health care law. If the justices strike the law down –in part or in total - Congress will be presented with a new opportunity to listen to the American people, fully engage doctors and other healthcare professionals and the business community and develop a proposal that assures families will have access to care they need from the doctor they choose at lower cost. Those decisions shouldn't be made by Washington.

“While we await the court’s decision, we continue to work to revise the new law. 

“The President’s 2010 health care law has 18 new taxes designed to offset its high costs. This week, the House voted to repeal one of them: a 2.3 % excise tax on medical devices sold in the United States, with exclusions for eyeglasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, and some other devices sold at retail for individual use. The tax affects the sale of everything from cardiac defibrillators to artificial joints to MRI scanners.

While the tax is formally payable by the manufacturers and importers of taxable devices, the impact will be felt by patients and workers as well. The tax will be passed along to hospitals, health care providers, and patients in the form of higher prices (leading to higher health insurance premiums).

“And then there’s the issue of lost jobs in the medical device industry, a critical part of New Jersey’s pharmaceutical industrial base. Some estimates claim this new tax could lead to a loss of about 14,000 jobs.

“I have often asked rhetorically: ‘when have you ever seen a higher tax produce a job?’ This example proves my point. As this tax takes effect, medical device manufacturing is being pushed abroad, make no mistake about it."

Rodney Frelinghuysen

Rodney Leads Energy and Water Development bill through House

The House of Representatives gave final legislative approval Wednesday evening to Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen’s Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill for the fiscal year beginning in October.  The $32 billion measure was passed by a vote of 255 to 165 after three days of open debate. 

In his closing statement on the House floor, Rodney said the bill endorsed policies “that built common ground for energy policy across our nation.

“And we've done it with a lot less money. We're actually, in some cases, close to the 2008 (spending) level, somewhere between 2008 and 2009. And while some people may like to damn us, we've done our best to cut spending and reflect the real economy out there, the fact that people are paying too much in the way of taxes, we have too much debt and such a large deficit.

“This is a fiscally conservative bill which funds critical national security, jobs, and infrastructure priorities while helping to fight future gasoline price increases. All of our constituents are wrestling with how to pay for higher gasoline bills on limited budgets. There is no such thing as a ‘quick fix’ to this problem, but the bill does strengthen the Department of Energy's programs, addressing the causes and impacts of higher gasoline prices down the road,” he said. “That’s the focus of the bill. Lower gas prices in the future, keep jobs here at home.”

The Energy and Water Development Act is just the third of the twelve annual appropriations bill to pass the House this year.

Read more about the bill here.

Recommended Reading: As summer beckons, it seems Americans are thinking more about the steep cost of energy than about making treks to the Shore. That’s the result of a poll published this week by Associated Press. Read “Americans put saving energy ahead of vacations” here.

Recommended Reading: Deroy Murdick writes in the National Review Online on Tuesday that federal regulators are keeping America from moving forward, red tape has squelched at least 779,203 potential jobs.  Read “Over-Regulation is Pricey” here.

CBO Paints a Bleak Fiscal and Economic Picture

The federal government is facing a monstrous debt, approaching 200 percent of the size of the American economy, within two decades if Congress and the President do not change course. This conclusion can be drawn from an analysis released this week by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The report underscores the painful consequences for American families should policymakers fail to advance fiscally responsible reforms.

CBO analysts said the recent economic downturn and the government’s response have been devastating for the nation’s fiscal condition. Federal debt as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — a standard measure of a government’s debt burden — stood at 40 percent at the end of 2008. But it will top 70 percent by the end of this year, and is only headed higher under current policies. The ratio could double by the middle of the next decade and will have topped 200 percent of GDP — twice the size of the projected U.S. economy — by 2037.

“This deteriorating fiscal report from CBO comes just days after last week’s dismal jobs report. Americans deserve better than spiraling debt and a no-jobs-growth ‘recovery,’” Rodney said. “Principled solutions are clear: curb spending and unnecessary bureaucratic regulations and reform the tax code to eliminate loopholes, lower rates and promote economic growth.  This is how we encourage private sector hiring! ”

Key points from the House Budget Committee on CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook:

• The Federal government’s unsustainable government spending increase the likelihood of a devastating crisis: the CBO report states that “Growing debt also would increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget and the government would thereby lose its ability to borrow at affordable rates.”
• The CBO report affirms that the massive health-care overhaul fails to address the explosion in health care costs. Mandatory federal spending on health care will increase by 93 percent from 5.4 percent of GDP today to 10.4 percent of GDP over the next 25 years.
• The CBO projects that government spending as a share of the economy will increase by nearly 53 percent between now and 2037, up from its historical average of roughly 20 percent. Taxes are projected to rise to the historical average in the years ahead, yet the unprecedented growth in government spending is projected to rise much faster, driving an unsustainable explosion in debt.
• The long-term budget outlook continues to worsen with each passing year Congress fails to act. While total debt already eclipsed the size of the entire US economy, debt held by the public is on pace to eclipse the economy shortly after 2022.
• The crushing burden of debt is driven primarily by the nation’s largest entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – along with the compounding growth in interest payments on the debt. Government spending on health care entitlements, Social Security, and interest on the national debt will consume 100 percent of total revenues by 2025.
• According to the CBO report, the federal government’s interest payments alone are projected to consume 9.5 percent of our entire economy by 2037, up from about 1.4 percent today.
• The CBO report warns of the economic consequences of the President’s insistence on increasing tax rates and raising barriers to job creation and economic growth. With the respect to counterproductive efforts to reduce the deficit by increasing tax rates, CBO states that “the extent that additional tax revenues were generated by boosting marginal tax rates, those higher rates would discourage people from working and saving, further reducing output and income.”

Read the full CBO report here.

Recommended Reading: Monday editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, “The Lowlights of Obamanomics.”

Rodney on Picatinny Small Business Symposium: “Valuable”

Rodney was recently the keynote speaker at a small business symposium sponsored by the Picatinny chapter of the National Contract Management Association in Randolph. The forum created opportunities for discussions between government officials and private companies seeking business with government agencies, both civilian and defense-related.

Read the Army report here.

Recommended Reading: Peter Brookes, writing about recent intelligence leaks in the Tuesday New York Post,“Boastful babbling a gift to our foes.”

Town Hall Meetings: Listening Tour Continues

Rodney will hold the next in a series of public town meetings on June 16 in Sparta and Parsippany. All area residents and interested citizens in the 11^th Congressional District are invited to attend.

The details of the meetings:

9:30a – 10:30a

Sparta Middle School

350 Main Street, Sparta, NJ 07871

12 noon - 1:00p

Parsippany Town Hall

1001 Parsippany Boulevard, Parsippany, NJ 07054

Rodney will provide an update on his work in Congress, including his efforts to promote the creation of jobs and opportunities in the real economy, cut federal spending, oppose tax hikes, upgrade homeland security, and support America’s military service members and their families.

“I hold public town meetings regularly to allow me to hear the voices of local residents,” he said. “The topics are theirs to choose. The opinions are theirs to give.”

Seating may be limited.  The facility is handicap-accessible. Constituent service staff will be available to address individual concerns. 

For more information or if you need assistance, please call Rodney’s local office at 973-984-0711.