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Public Statements

Providing for Consideration of H.R. 436, Health Care Cost Reduction Act of 2012, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 5882, Legislation Branch Appropriations Act, 2013

Floor Speech

Location: Washington, DC


Mr. LANKFORD. It is interesting to talk about an open or closed rule when we are discussing something with the Affordable Care Act. We all know what an open process that it was developed under and how wide open and inclusive that that was.

Let's talk some basic economics with this.

If you tax something more, you get less of it. That's simple economics. Apparently, somehow there is a desire to get less medical innovation. If we go to the medical innovators--the people with the latest devices, the newest devices, the best devices that are getting Americans healthier, that are providing a better quality of life for people from infants to senior adults--and then tax them more, we are discouraging them from future innovation and from creating the next products that create the next big medical wave on it.

Currently, the best medical innovation in the world is happening in the United States of America. We want to keep it that way. We talk a lot about: Why are we losing manufacturing jobs? Why are manufacturing jobs going around the world? I'll tell you why we're losing manufacturing jobs. It's because, every time you turn around when you're in a manufacturing segment, you've got a Federal regulator in your building who is checking out something else. Whether it's your paperwork or your process or your people, they are constantly checking everything else. We also have this very high corporate tax structure. We have the highest in the industrial world. Now we're taking it to the medical device folks and making it even higher and making it even harder.

What we need to do is have the best medical innovation in the world here, but we don't do that by punishing those companies for doing it here. If we want companies to go overseas and to do the best innovation in the world somewhere else, then we should continue to raise taxes on them. This solves that. This keeps it here. It keeps the companies here and keeps them from relocating and offshoring. It keeps premiums from going up. As the medical device cost goes up--guess what?--insurance premiums go up as well, as well as dental costs for dental devices.

This is just another example of picking winners and losers and finding an industry that is successful and saying, Let's tax them more so we can move that money somewhere else. I'll tell you what. Let's just have the best medical innovation in the world continue to be here. Let's take care of that medical device tax and clear it out as of today.


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