What Happens When Elizabeth Warren Sells Out to Powerful Interests? [View all]

[Vegas Roller]

Last September, I wrote about Elizabeth Warren’s smart platform, which has harnessed the most politically attractive elements of the populist agenda while avoiding the most politically vulnerable parts. The concerns I have about Warren as a policymaker are not the issues she talks about, but the issues she doesn’t. Here are two issues where I believe Warren has done the wrong thing. There is a common theme here: They challenge and complicate her populist appeal.

The medical device tax. When Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, they paid for it in part by cutting back payments to medical providers. The logic was that, since the government was going to create tens of millions of new paying customers, the industry that would profit from serving those customers could contribute some of its windfall to financing their care and still come out even. Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers all accepted this bargain, but the one sector that refused was the medical device industry. So rather than let the medical device industry get away with being the one sector that enjoyed the profit from a coverage expansion without bearing any of the cost, lawmakers imposed a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices.

The industry has relentlessly lobbied to repeal the tax. Massachusetts contains a major hub of medical device manufacturing, and Warren has relentlessly championed her home-state interest. She has co-sponsored legislation to repeal the medical device tax, written an op-ed advocating the tax repeal for the industry’s own newsletter, and proposed a bill that would penalize manufacturers of pharmaceuticals (but, crucially, not the medical device industry) for misappropriating funds intended for scientific research.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/elizabeth-warren-sells-out-campaign-charter-schools-medical-device-tax.html