The Medical Device Industry

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARR. I thank my friend, the gentleman from Minnesota, my friend, the gentleman from Indiana, and I want to compliment both of the gentlemen here and my friends on the other side of the aisle for their leadership, and, in particular, the gentleman from Minnesota, who has been an absolute champion in advocating life-improving and lifesaving technologies that really stand a chance of declining as a sector of our economy and, more importantly, declining as an opportunity for Americans and people all around this world to achieve a better life, a better way of life, and to actually have an opportunity to live because of some of this lifesaving technology.

The medical technology industry impacts all of us all over this country. The medical device industry is in virtually every State. But it's in my home State, the Commonwealth of Kentucky as well. Kentucky has over 7,500 jobs in the medical technology industry.

The med-tech job multiplier factor in Kentucky guarantees that for every one job in the Commonwealth's medical technology sector, 1.8 additional jobs are created as a result. And these jobs are responsible for over $364 million in total personal income and $1.3 billion in annual output for Kentucky. According to the Battellle study, the medical device tax could cost Kentucky over 100 jobs in this high-paying, high-tech sector.

But as my friends have noted tonight, this is not just about jobs. It's not just about economic growth or free enterprise and the opportunities that these companies create for workers and for people. It's really about creating a quality of life for so many Kentucky families. This truly is a life-or-death decision.

There's a lot of reasons why I oppose ObamaCare, but tonight you're seeing something happen on ObamaCare that we haven't seen as much, and that is a huge bipartisan outpouring of opposition to this particular feature of ObamaCare, the medical device tax, a tax on the revenues of medical device manufacturers, not on the profits, but the revenues, a job-killing, innovation-destroying tax that absolutely should be repealed. And we should do it sooner rather than later.

But there's a human dimension to this. There's a reason why we should repeal this tax, and it is because it is going to compromise the quality of health care that Americans and people all over this planet receive because of the innovation of the medical technology sector.

This innovation has benefited my own family in a profound way recently, and it's benefited, actually, two members of my family. The gentleman from Minnesota was mentioning my father, and certainly my father is the beneficiary of a pacemaker. And it was just December 25 last year, Christmas Day, last year, I got a call from my mother, and she told me that my father had fainted. He had a fainting spell, and that obviously worried me and my wife. And so I picked up the phone and asked to speak to my father, and I did. And he was a little shaky, and I encouraged him to stop drinking the coffee and call us back if he needed anything.

About an hour later, again, Christmas morning--we were planning on going over to his home to see him later that day--I got another phone call, this time again from my mother. But this time it was from the emergency room, and it was very alarming. And she said, You need to get over here right away.

So I got in the car and sped over to the ER and walked in there, and I was greeted by the emergency room physician, and he said that my father was in a room getting an EKG. And I went over there and he showed me the tape of the EKG, and it showed his--basically, a flat line.

And I said, Well, what does that mean?

And he said, Andy, your father's heart is slowing down.

Now, that is a very grim report from an emergency room physician, I can tell you. And I know families all across this country experience difficult health care emergencies in their families as well.

But I asked the doctor, I said, Well, what are we going to do about this?

And he said, We're going to call in an electrophysiology expert, a cardiologist who's going to come in, and we are going to take a look at this.

The electrophysiology expert came in and he said, We've got good news. We can fix your father. We can put in a pacemaker in emergency surgery, and we really think we can fix this problem. Otherwise, he's in good health. It's just that he has an electrical problem with his cardiovascular system.

And so my father went into emergency surgery, got a pacemaker, a great new piece of technology put into his heart. And when he came out of surgery, the doctor checked everything and everything was great, and this pacemaker had saved my father's life.

Another story, my sister, Emily, 2 years older than me, she has suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for her entire life. And for those of you listening on TV tonight and those of who have loved ones, or if you suffer yourself from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, you know what a disabling condition this can be.

It eats away at the joints. Emily is a brave person. She's a very faithful person, a very optimistic person. But she's gone through a lot. One of the things she's had to go through is hip replacement surgery and knee replacement surgery. And when anyone who is an athlete and gets hip replacements or joints replacements or suffers from arthritis and has to have these surgeries, you know that this is critical in order to become functional in your life.

Fortunately, through the innovation of medical devices, through the unbelievable entrepreneurial spirit, American medical device manufacturers have come up with prosthetic hips and joints and knees. And those innovations, those medical devices, were implanted in my sister's broken and disabled body, and she can walk because
of that. Because of that, she can walk. And hundreds and thousands and even millions of Americans can walk because of the unbelievable innovation of medical device manufacturers.

And this summer, my sister had to have a couple of hip revisions because it had been 15 years since her last hip replacement. So she had two surgeries and had hip revisions and new implants into her hips so that she could continue to function--disabled--but still function and do all the things she can do to serve her community and her family.

Mr. Speaker, I tell these stories not because my family is unique. There's families all around this country sitting at home tonight who can tell stories just like the stories I told tonight about my father and the pacemaker that saved his life or my sister and the prosthetic joints that she now has that help her in her daily life.

There are all kinds of stories like this. There's the story of Sheila that Congressman Young was talking about in the Hoosier State of Indiana.

This has a human dimension to it. ObamaCare is bad policy for a lot of reasons, but on this particular reason we need to come together as a country. It was great to see friends on the other side of the aisle come and join us in the fight to repeal this job-killing medical device tax, which is really impairing the quality of life for so many Americans and has the potential to really suppress medical innovation that improves lives.

I'll just conclude by saying this: in a note of bipartisan optimism in a time of conflict and divided government in Washington, the truth be told, there's no such thing as a Republican heart attack or a Democrat heart attack. There's no such thing as Republican arthritis or Democratic arthritis.

The human condition is such that we face these challenges in our lives. And our loved ones and our families face these challenges in our life. So why on Earth would we support a policy in Washington, D.C., that limits the innovation that can better the human condition?

And so that's what I would say in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, my friends and colleagues here tonight. Let's repeal this medical device tax, let's help American families all around this country, and let's help the human condition to make sure that they have the opportunity for health and achieve their potential.

I appreciate the gentleman's leadership.

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