Earlier this month, Dick Cheney stated that the medical device tax may have killed him if it were in effect in the decades he struggled against heart disease. The former vice president received a heart transplant in 2012.
Cheney is continuing to protest against the tax in recent interviews. “I’m very worried about it; I think it is a terrible idea,” he recently said in an interview on FOX News. “This is a unique tax that is on the first dollar of revenue that comes in to the people who have invented and created these devices.”
The former vice president recounts the progress that has made in the cardiovascular field over the years. “I had quadruple coronary bypass in 1988—tough surgery. Stents weren’t available then. Later on, when I had a minor problem, I had a stent,” he said. It was a “piece of cake. An outpatient procedure almost.”
“That development has saved the lives of millions of people. Would that device have been developed or would it have been developed slower when you start to tax something like that, it seems to me, you do serious damage to the long term prospects for innovation and our economy,” he explained.
Cheney has published a memoir that details the considerable advances made interventional cardiology over the past decades. Titled “Heart: An American Medical Odyssey,” the book recounts Cheney’s struggles with heart disease, which began in the late 1970s. In 2012, after suffer a number of subsequent heart attacks and cardiovascular problems, Cheney received a heart transplant.
