Erik Paulsen: “Thank you very much for your leadership, as well, on the Energy and Commerce Committee and for understanding the value…”

“Thank you very much for your leadership, as well, on the Energy and Commerce Committee and for understanding the value of keeping these life-saving and live-improving technologies alive and well. In a State like Colorado--I know your heart goes out to some other challenges in Colorado right now with the flooding, etcetera, but I know that that innovative and entrepreneurial spirit will see Coloradans through that situation as well. Mr. Speaker, I want to mention one other thing--and my colleague from the Ways and Means Committee, I think, can comment on this a little bit as well--but there's no doubt this is about less invasive technology. This is about keeping people out of the hospital. It's about keeping health care and lowering health care costs. This is a very complicated tax. This is not just a simple tax. It's collected every 2 weeks; every single 2 weeks. So a $30 billion tax, it's actually extremely challenging for companies to figure out how they're going to collect the tax. It's pretty onerous. So it's more complicated than a typical excise tax. It's regulated by the IRS--of course. The complexity and the difficulty in developing these regulations for the tax actually underscores that an excise tax--it's a very blunt and a very damaging instrument that is being applied to a highly innovative and dynamic industry, which you just talked about. And the compliance costs alone are very hard, as we've learned in the Ways and Means Committee.”