Health Care Costs Reduction Act of 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
This bill is mainly a smoke screen. It is an effort to cover up the failure, indeed the refusal, of Republicans to act on the key issue facing our Nation: jobs and economic growth.
As ranking member, I sent a letter last Friday to Dave Camp, who chairs the committee with the jurisdiction over the bill before us today, urging action on six major jobs bills within the committee's jurisdiction: extension of the section 48(c) advanced energy manufacturing credit; extension of the production tax credit for wind power and other vital advanced-energy incentives; extension of the highly successful build America bonds program, which financed more than $180 billion in infrastructure investment; extension of the 100 percent bonus depreciation; creation of a 10 percent income tax credit for small businesses that do create new jobs or increase their payroll; an extension of a jobs-related expired provision, such as the R&D tax credit.
The answer: silence and continued inaction by Republicans in this House.
Another bill over which the committee has jurisdiction, the highway bill, remains unacted upon. That bill would mean millions of jobs. No action. The Republican House message on the highway bill is: our way or the highway. And that means no highways.
It is June. There is now the likelihood of no action or none before the construction season is over in numerous States. That inaction is not an accident. It is deliberate. It is implementing the goal stated 20 months ago by the Senate Republican leader:
``The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.''
It is reflected in the recent interview by the House Republican leader. Mr. Cantor said the rest of the year will likely be about ``sending signals, we have huge problems to deal with.''
Sending signals? The American people don't need and want signals. They need for us to take action to strengthen the economic recovery.
We will hear today Republican efforts to describe the bill before us to repeal the tax on medical devices as a jobs bill. What it really is is another Republican effort to repeal health care reform, step by step, costing, in this case, $29 billion.
We Democrats want more Americans to have access to medical devices. Health care reform helps do this by expanding insurance coverage to over 30 million individuals, which indeed will help the growth of and the innovation in the medical device industry. And as was true for other health groups benefiting from increases in health coverage, the medical device industry was asked to help to pay for health care reform so it would be fully paid for, not add to the deficit, as so many Republican measures, but it would be fully paid for.
They signed a letter with others pledging:
``We, as stakeholder representatives, are committed to doing our part to make reform a reality in order to make the system more affordable and effective for patients and purchasers. We stand ready to work with you to accomplish this goal.''
The first signature on that letter is from and by the President and CEO of the Advanced Medical Technology Association.
Now the Republicans are attempting to give that industry a free pass--a free pass--contrary to their stated commitment. The industry has not proposed any alternative whatsoever to meet that obligation reflected in the letter they signed. There is an effort here to cast repeal of the tax as a small business bill.
The 10 largest companies in this submarket would pay 86 percent of the taxes relating to nondiagnostic devices. According to CRS, the 10 largest companies that manufacture medical devices had total companywide profits on all their lines of businesses, both devices and other products, of $42 billion in 2010, including companies mentioned here, and $48 billion in 2011, and these companies had gross revenues from the sale of medical devices in 2010 of $133 billion.
There was an effort here also to cast the bill as an effort to stop offshoring, but this point needs to be made. It's a fact: The tax applies to all covered devices, including those that are imported. So if anybody thinks they can just move overseas and bring it back here and not pay a tax, they're simply incorrect.
The effort to cast this as a jobs bill involved allegations repeated here during the debate on the rule, which were analyzed by a neutral source and found to be simply erroneous. A Bloomberg group analysis made that clear: ``The study used by Republicans cites no evidence for the job loss claim.''
Further, the study's assumptions, ``conflict with economic research, overstate companies' incentives to move jobs offshore, and ignore the positive effect of new demand'' created by the health care reform law.
Before Rules yesterday, I asked that my substitute be placed in order to allow debate on two real jobs initiatives mentioned in my letter to you, Chairman Camp: a tax credit for employers that expand their payrolls, and an extension of bonus depreciation. Those two provisions would help create hundreds of thousands of jobs, not speculation, but real, including in small businesses. This has not been allowed.
So we have open rules, as we have seen the last few days on some bills, that often mainly result in numerous amendments, shifting some monies from one place to another in an agency, not often helping to create a single job, but a closed rule when it comes to bringing up provisions helping to create American jobs and economic growth.
This is further evidence of what is really going on here in this Congress, a deliberate effort now increasingly undisguised to close the door on action to engender job creation and economic growth before the election.
November 6 is what is driving the Republican Congress. Politics, not people. That is only not cynical, it is, indeed, pernicious. We owe it to the American people to blow the whistle on this. Too much, indeed, is at stake.
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Mr. LEVIN. I yield myself 30 seconds.
It's the Republicans who've combined these three bills. The Republicans.
And the leader talks about jobs. I wish he would give instructions to the Ways and Means Committee to consider and bring up jobs bills that are just languishing from inaction. We need more than signals. We need action.
I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Thompson), a distinguished member of our committee.
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Mr. LEVIN. I yield myself 30 seconds.
We very much favor the medical device industry. They agreed to pay for health insurance coverage. In 2011, Stryker had revenue of $8.37 billion on these products with a net income of $1.3 billion. Everybody is going to have to participate, as they promised, to make health care work. If everybody ducks out, people will go uninsured.
It is now my privilege to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).
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