I cornered MichBio president and CEO Stephen Rapundalo and asked him what, if anything, scares his membership about the health care reform bills now bouncing through Congress.
Rapundalo said medical device makers are seriously concerned about a new medical device tax on any FDA-approved device. The tax is $4 billion over 10 years in the Senate version, $2 billion a year in the House version.
Rapundalo said it would simply drive medical device makers overseas in search of cheap labor. He also said hospitals would be forced to pass the tax along in operations.
Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow opposes the tax, and played a key role in a research and development tax credit in the bill for small and mid-sized pharmaceutical companies. That's why MichBio gave her their legislator of the year award at the event.
The Kalamazoo Radisson looked goregous for the event. If the meeting rooms weren't recently remodeled they sure looked it.
Let's see, last time I was in what is now the Arcadia Ballroom it was the summer of 1990, I was a reporter at the Kalamazoo Gazette, and an economist from either First of America Bank or brokers First of Michigan Corp. (I can't remember which, but they're both long gone) was telling a bunch of people that there was no reason why the Ronald Reagan - George H.W. Bush expansion and end-of-the-cold-war 'peace dividend' couldn't go on forever.
Yuh-huh. A quarter or two later we were in recession and at war with Saddam.
MichBio used almost every corner of the Radisson and its attached meeting rooms and public spaces. More than 50 exhibitors poured out of the designated ground floor space and out into the hallways -- a nice problem to have.
But there was room for a couple of other events Wednesday. One was a private company's lunch whose Mexican food bar looked awfully tempting. And another, next door to the staff and media work room, featured lunch hour sing-alongs to an old-timey piano. Rotary? Close. Kiwanis.
Oh, and ya gotta love the WiFi in the Kalamazoo Radisson, provided by CTS Communications Corp., part of the tiny and amusingly named Climax Telephone -- a blistering 4.12 megabytes per second download, a nearly synchronous 4.01 meg upload, and an absolutely-no-Max-Headroom-style-pauses-in-video ping of 30 milliseconds.
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