Medical device tax – FDA list of dental office products

UPDATE – I just found out medical device tax hits vets also.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I am.

The medical device tax is part of Obamacare and is one of 21 new taxes designed to raise funds to pay for the newly accrued health care costs.  It is a tax of 2.3% that is placed on nearly everything any healthcare provider touches.  There is a bill in the congress to delay the implementation of the medical device tax, but only for a short time.  This new value added tax, designed to be hidden from the general public, will almost certainly be put into place.  The dollar amount is only part of the problem.  Dental offices do not currently charge taxes on any of the services they provide and although nearly all of these taxes will be charged directly to the dentist without the dental office having to do any extra paperwork, there are products that we manufacture in our offices on a regular basis that we will have to now track and charge ourselves the medical device tax.  Because dental offices have never dealt with taxes of this nature and it will only be on certain products that we ourselves make, a dental office will always have fairly inefficient systems of managing, tracking, collecting, and paying these taxes.  Inefficiencies cost money and unnecessarily raise the costs of the services we provide, which as anyone who has received dental care knows are not particularity cheap.  The cost of managing the paperwork side of this tax will likely be close to the actual cost of the tax itself.  This problem is much worse for dental labs.

Here is a current list of the materials the FDA has deemed to be medical devices in a dental office, to sum it up, everything the dentist touches.

I have written to my Senator in regards to this topic.  I placed the caption in bold that displays the full economic intelligence of some of our leaders.  By that logic, since dental industry receives no new patients under Obamacare but still pays the tax, I can only assume the dental industry will be paying our UNFAIR share.