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  • Paralyzed woman moves robotic arm with her thoughts

    A paralyzed Massachusetts woman picked up a bottle of coffee and sipped from it by moving a robotic arm with her thoughts, researchers reported Wednesday – the latest advance in the race to restore movement to people who have lost control of their m
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  • Taxing jobs out of existence

    Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple's birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical
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  • Paulsen: Med-tech tax repeal vote may come this year

    The medical device tax repeal effort is likely to hit the U.S. House floor this year, Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-Minn.) said during an exclusive interview with MassDevice.
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  • Tongue-Depressor Tax Will Harm Jobs, Innovation: Ramesh Ponnuru

    A year from now, the federal government will start collecting a new tax on medical devices from tongue depressors to imaging machines, thanks to the sweeping health-care overhaul that Democrats enacted in the spring of 2010. People in the industry say it&
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  • FDA in the way of jobs and cures

    Joe Pitts is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee
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  • The med-tech tax repeal movement gains momentum

    Minnesota Rep. Erik Paulsen gains support for his attempts to repeal the 2.3 percent medical device tax prescribed by President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
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  • Editorial: A truly bipartisan push for innovation

    Minnesota's congressional delegation has done something radical in an era when bipartisanship seems extinct by working across the aisle on a sensible set of reforms to streamline the medical-device regulatory process.
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  • Sen. Scott Brown Takes Aim at the Medical Device Tax

    Sen. Scott Brown, in an exclusive editorial for MassDevice, calls for the repeal of the medical device tax contained in the Affordable Care Act.
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  • OP-ED: Paulsen and Gerlach: Medical Device Tax Hinders Innovation

    At a time when our greatest priority needs to be creating jobs for our unemployed citizens, the government is on the verge of implementing a new medical device excise tax that will eliminate more than 40,000 well-paying jobs and imperil America's global competitiveness in one of our leading industrial and technological sectors.
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  • Medical device tax a job-killer, industry advocates say

    The medical device industry, gathered in Washington this week for its annual conference, locks in on the jobs issue in arguing against the impending medical device excise tax. But will it work?
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  • Medical Device Makers Push Congress to Repeal Excise Tax

    WASHINGTON – When Cook Medical Inc. decided to spend $35 million to build two manufacturing plants in Canton, Ill., it wasn't just business. It was personal.
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  • The Medical Device Industry and Jobs

    With the markets seesawing and unemployment rising, creating and maintaining jobs remains Americans' top priority. Spurring job creation in a field that actually improves people's lives would be doubly beneficial, which is why health innovation remains a top public policy objective.
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  • A Defibrillator for American Jobs

    Over the past decade, the continued loss of middle-class jobs has stoked anxiety and shattered dreams of many Americans. Factors largely outside of policymakers' control – like globalization's spread and technology-based efficiency gains – contribute to some of today's anemic employment conditions.
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  • Device makers say tax will cost 43,000 U.S. jobs

    The medical device industry says it could lose 10 percent of its U.S. workforce because of a tax created by healthcare reform.
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  • Colorado Sen. to FDA: Regulatory science isn't enough

    The FDA's recent efforts to revamp the science behind developing and evaluating products are great, says Colo. Sen. Michael Bennet (D), but what is the agency doing to drive the global economy?
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  • A tax that stifles technology in a high-tech town

    By Rep. Duncan Hunter & Rep. Brian Bilbray
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  • Medical Device Review Reform Proposed by Representative Paulsen

    Rep. Erik Paulsen (Minn.) announced his plan to propose new legislation before Congress's August recess aimed at reforming the FDA's approval procedure for medical devices. Testifying at an Oversight and Government Reform Health Care subcommittee hearing on June 2, Paulsen said he plans to simplify the approval process used by the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health ("CDRH") in order to compete with regulatory agencies in Europe.
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  • Med-tech looks for its RX

    Recommendations to help the med-tech industry include changes to trade, tax, regulatory and research policies.
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  • Paulsen: FDA's Bureaucracy is Threatening America's Medical Device Industry

    Representative Erik Paulsen (MN-03), co-chair of the House Medical Technology Caucus, appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's hearing regarding the Federal Drug Administration's pre-market review processes, which are routinely criticized as opaque, inconsistent and unpredictable.
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  • Pat Toomey, Charlie Dent Pledge to Fight Health Care Reform's Medical Device Tax | The Express-Times

    U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey and U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent headed a panel of speakers this morning at a B Braun Medical Inc. facility in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, bent on disabling a provision of last year's health care reform bill. The bill calls for a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices to go into effect in 2013. Officials at B Braun, which makes a host of products used in medical settings, and other Lehigh Valley device-makers say the tax is onerous, job-killing, and in some instances, intolerable. "It would wipe us out," said Chris Field, chief financial officer for Boas Surgical, a small Allentown firm that makes and sells prosthetics and orthotics. "We would not survive."
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  • Med-tech industry lobbies for tax credit | Minneapolis Star Tribune

    The big guns in medical technology are lining up to support a bill recently introduced in Congress that would make a research-and-development tax credit a permanent part of the federal tax code. The bill, called the American Research and Competitiveness Act, was introduced last week by Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and has attracted bipartisan support, including Rep. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., a co-sponsor whose suburban Twin Cities district is home to several med-tech companies. "Research and development is imperative to our country's competitiveness in the global marketplace," Paulsen said. "We need a tax code that spurs innovation and promotes sustainable job growth in industries like medical technology, which provides thousands of high-paying jobs in Minnesota."
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  • ABC's ‘Private Practice' Features Sunnyvale Company's Da Vinci Surgical Robot | Peninsula Press

    On TV, but like in real life, a patient with extensive cancer was told she had months to live. But the doctor said there might be one last treatment. "I did some research and found a new protocol…on this machine, the da Vinci… I'd be able to cut in ways that I'd never be able to do freehand," Dr. Addison Montgomery said during a Jan. 6 episode of "Private Practice," ABC's popular medical drama. The scene cuts away, and the dynamic Dr. Montgomery turns to speak to the patient's desperate lover about the cancer surgery: "We got it. All of it," she says triumphantly.
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  • Lawmakers debate efficiency of FDA | Minneapolis Star Tribune

    A hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday provided little middle ground in the debate over whether medical devices are regulated too much, or too little, by the Food and Drug Administration. The two-hour hearing of the House Energy & Commerce Committee's health subcommittee pitted concerns that unsafe products get on the market against arguments that the FDA's approval process stifles innovation.
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  • Robotics Competition Paves Way for Biomedical Tools | ABC 7 San Francisco

    Group of Bay Area high school students are heading into battle with the help of some high-tech advisors. It's not a football or basketball game, but a national robotics competition and the students are getting help from a company that used robotics to help revolutionize brain surgery. A step ladder glued together with plastic pipe is the foundation for what will soon become a full-blown robot.
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  • FDA charts a new path to device approval | Minneapolis Star Tribune

    The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a new way for breakthrough medical devices to be approved by the agency. In a briefing Tuesday, agency officials said the new Innovation Pathway is part of an initiative designed to help cutting-edge products win quicker clearance -- a huge issue in Minnesota, home to more than 300 med-tech companies, including industry giant Medtronic Inc. Many industry officials charge that the FDA's approval process is inefficient and unpredictable.
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  • Bill would eliminate $20B tax on med-tech companies | Minneapolis Star Tribune

    A Minnesota Republican has introduced legislation in Congress that would repeal a controversial $20 billion tax on medical device companies that is part of federal health care reform. The tax, intended to help pay for President Obama's health care overhaul, is highly unpopular in Minnesota -- home to some 300 medical technology companies, including the world's largest, Fridley-based Medtronic Inc.
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