On the recordNovember 2, 2011
I thank the gentleman from Minnesota for his leadership and I certainly share your desire to lighten the burden on this high-value-added industry. We need to ensure that all of the manufacturing jobs, all of the job and economic growth opportunities that we can help create an environment for, a nurturing environment for, that we do. {time} 1710 One thing that I hear as I travel around southeastern Indiana and listen to my constituents, there's a lot of feedback about the level of uncertainty within our economy. There's regulatory uncertainty, there's uncertainty about future tax rates, and there's uncertainty about energy rates and health care costs. And so these medical device manufacturers are certainly laboring under the burden of uncertainty with respect to the FDA regulatory process. And then here we add an additional excise tax to their bottom line. And so I'm happy to support H.R. 436, which would lighten that burden. I don't think probably many people appreciate--I certainly didn't appreciate it until I started looking into it--exactly how burdensome this device tax could be on the medical device industry. The tax is 2.3 percent of gross sales. So that's a top-line tax before all the other deductions and costs come out. So, essentially, that would translate into about 15 percent taxation on profits of many of these medical device companies.…





