Medical device firms spent millions to get the device tax to go away

In case you've missed this. Not only "my" Republican member of the house, but "my" two Democratic Senators voted to repeal an important part of the ACA.

http://www.startribune.com/medical-device-firms-spent-millions-to-get-the-device-tax-to-go-away/364031911/

WASHINGTON – It took tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions, but in the end, Minnesota's medical device companies got what they wanted out of Congress: the gutting of a sales tax they claimed was crippling them.

In the waning days before the Christmas recess, both chambers of Congress passed a two-year suspension of the 2.3 percent excise tax without finding a replacement for the lost revenue — a decision that would add roughly $29 billion to the national debt over 10 years if the suspension eventually leads to the tax's permanent repeal.

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Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen has successfully passed seven House bills since 2012 to get the excise tax repealed. He also consistently led the pack in the House and Senate for campaign contributions from the medical device industry, pulling in $97,000.

In the upper chamber, Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken worked on it, too. Klobuchar has been fighting the tax from the beginning. In 2012, her most recent election cycle, she received $90,000 in campaign contributions from the industry. When he was up for re-election in 2014, Franken received $55,000 from the medical device industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group based in Washington, D.C.

The companies, and the politicians supporting a repeal, complained the tax was crippling a budding industry. They blamed it for lackluster growth; many politicians, including Paulsen, called it a "job killer." That rhetoric, though, isn't in line with three reviews of the medical device industry over the past couple of years. Those studies found that massive job losses weren't necessarily a result of the tax, in part because companies could pass higher costs along to consumers by increasing prices.

What is clear is that the tax's suspension was a windfall for device companies, especially the big ones. Medtronic paid about $135 million in excise taxes in fiscal year 2015.

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Craig Holman, who works for the government watchdog group Public Citizen, calls this pay-to-play effort on Capitol Hill heavily influential in how politicians operate.

"Obamacare needs that tax in order to survive. … The mere fact that you've got liberal Democrats in Minnesota undermining the financing of Obamacare really shows how much influence campaign contributions can have," he said.