by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | October 25, 2012
AdvaMed officials said in a call with reporters that they thought the report would help with their efforts to fight the tax.
"We do think it has a very significant bearing on the medical device tax," David Nexon, senior executive vice president, said during the call.
"If you apply the tax in our very competitive industry, companies will have to find the money somewhere," he said, arguing that firms could cut back on research spending or lay off workers.
How the study was done
The study, titled "Estimates of medical device spending in the United States", relied on a mixture of sources to pull the data on medical device prices and expenditures.
The authors said they used the North American Industry Classification System data to find codes indicating medical device types. They then tried to calculate shipments of devices consumed in the U.S.; this includes goods produced by manufacturers, plus imports and minus exports, or what's known as a "commodity-flow" procedure, they said. The researchers also took into account the margins, or the difference between the manufacturers' price and the purchasers' price, and which factors in transportation costs, taxes and the retailers' or wholesalers' services. Data on shipments and imports were taken from censuses carried out by the U.S. Census Bureau. Price data came from the Producer Price Index maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The authors did end with some caveats. Although they said the census data was "high quality," errors, both of the sampling and non-sampling variety, could sneak through. Also, they said blending different sources of data together, as they did, can always introduce errors.
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