medical devices

The hospitals have pledged more than $150 billion over a decade. Drug makers have chipped in another $80 billion. And the medical device manufacturers’ voluntary contribution to health reform? $0.
Indeed, as The Washington Post reported over the weekend, that failure to lend a financial hand for the sake of fixing the broken health care [...]

During the two-week debate over health care reform in the Senate Finance Committee, it was a Republican — Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.) — who pushed back most vocally against a proposal from Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to save $4 billion a year by charging fees to medical device makers. But some Democrats are none too [...]

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein hits the nail on the head today regarding the toughest hurdle Democrats face in passing health reform this year: Namely, the inertial force of the medical-industrial complex that’s been built up around the inefficient health system that’s in place.
The central problem in health-care reform is that good policy and good [...]

Since 2006, the Food and Drug Administration has ignored its own internal regulation and stopped requiring manufacturers of medical devices – such as pacemakers, heart valves and other life-sustaining inventions – to meet specific safety requirements before they are deemed safe enough to be implanted in humans.
As the Project on Government Oversight reveals in a [...]