Now that the U.S. House of Representatives has voted down a higher debt ceiling for the U.S. government, Congress can go back the drawing board on deciding how many Medicare spending cuts the voters and stakeholders can stomach, but as always, there are pockets of concern within the larger picture. The picture for device makers is somewhat complicated in part because the Medicare Part B “doc fix” is a $30 billion-a-year overhang that will be tough to resolve, not just because of the positions taken up on each side of Capitol Hill. On the Senate side, Kent Conrad (D-North...
A second look at NIH spending priorities By MARK McCARTY Medical Device Daily Washington Editor A couple of weeks ago, I posted something to this blog about NIH spending and whether it made sense, but there are other ways of doing the accounting. As I mentioned on May 1, the amount said to be allocated for the National Cancer Institute for fiscal 2010 was slightly more than $5 billion whereas the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute took in about $2 billion less. This stands in contrast to the respective burdens of these disease groups, which is roughly $475 billion...
Is the sky falling? Device makers keep saying so By MARK McCARTY Medical Device Daily Washington Editor FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health is certainly on a regulatory tear of late, and industry is understandably rattled by some of the developments. After all, CDRH only recently managed to shed a couple of obvious malcontents in the persons of Robert Smith, MD, and Julian Nichols, MD, who both worked at the Office of Device Evaluation at CDRH and were not exactly happy to get their walking papers. My impression is that you have to be either really obnoxious, noticeably incompetent,...
