Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about the simplicity of the medical device excise tax and to remind people, as the majority leader said, that this is really about repealing the Affordable Care Act. This is not a debate about just the medical device excise tax. This is an effort to repeal the entire action. This is a tremendous industry. I've worked with them for years. There are 400 medical device companies that employ 24,000 people and about 82,000 people indirectly. It is critical to the Massachusetts economy. We are debating the same issue we debated 2 years ago when I worked closely with colleagues. By the way, the way Congress once functioned was to work with labor and the respective industries and with Members on both sides of the aisle in order to have an outcome that everybody, if they didn't love it, could at least come to say that they liked. I negotiated decreasing that tax from 5 to 2.3 percent, and I stood up to those who thought it ought to be 5 percent. The big request from the industry was that they wanted the devices that were imported to be subject to the same tax. They were absolutely correct. We reached a compromise with the industry that bought into this suggestion because they knew that they would benefit from the expansion of insured individuals under the Affordable Care Act. I should note something that is very important today, which is that the industry receives Medicare payments indirectly via payments from hospitals.…”