House approves GOP bill repealing medical tax

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Scoffing at a White House veto threat, the House voted Thursday to repeal a tax on medical device makers that Republicans cast as a job-killing levy that would stifle an innovative industry.

Lawmakers approved the measure 270-146, with 37 Democrats from states with a heavy presence of medical equipment makers like Minnesota, New York and California joining all 233 voting Republicans. Most Democrats said the bill was yet another GOP attempt to weaken President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, which created the tax to help pay for that law's expansion of health care coverage to 30 million Americans.

The election-year clash over the bill sponsored by Rep. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., was the latest between the two parties to mix the themes of taxes, jobs, fairness and Obama's health care law as each side hunts for ways to appeal to voters.

Republicans and the medical device industry, which lobbied heavily for the bill, were hoping Thursday's passage would pressure the Senate to approve the measure. Its fate there seems bleak, with Democrats who run that chamber saying they don't intend to bring up the measure for a vote.

But its prospects may not have been helped by the House roll call itself, which fell 18 votes short of the 288 needed to override a veto with a two-thirds majority of the 432-member chamber. The House has three vacancies.

The 2.3 percent tax, set to take effect in January, is aimed at U.S. sales of medical devices used chiefly by doctors and hospitals, such as pacemakers and CT scan machines. Exempted are consumer items like eyeglasses and kits for many blood tests that people can perform on themselves.

Repealing the tax would cost the government $29 billion over the coming decade. To pay for that, Republicans included a provision ? also opposed by Democrats ? raising $44 billion by erasing limits on money the government could recover in overpayments to lower-earning people who will get insurance subsidies under the health care law.

U.S. medical device companies employ around 400,000 people and boast sales of around $130 billion annually. Citing a study financed by AdvaMed, the industry's largest trade group, Republicans said the tax would eliminate around 43,000 jobs, be especially hard on startup companies that are struggling to make a profit and eat up money that businesses could use to develop new products.

"Do we want less innovation, less entrepreneurship, less high-tech jobs and less medical breakthroughs?" said Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif. "If you think America has too much of these things, vote 'no'" ? a vote against the repeal bill.

Republicans also used the debate to take shots at the broader health care law, even as the Supreme Court prepares to rule later this month on its constitutionality.

"We should not be increasing taxes to pay for a law that a majority of Americans want repealed," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said.

Democrats said the industry study was flawed and ignored the new customers they said device companies would get under the health care law's expansion of coverage. They said for an industry expected to earn $1.5 trillion in revenue over the next decade, a $29 billion tax was a small price to pay.

They also noted that AdvaMed had signed a letter in 2009 as Democrats began writing the health overhaul legislation, in which industry groups agreed that they would each bear part of the law's costs.

"Unlike what happened the previous eight years, we want to pay for things so that we don't get ourselves deeper into debt," Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., said.

He was referring to the administration of former President George W. Bush, whom Democrats often lambast for massive tax cuts and two wars that were paid for with historically high federal deficits.

Democrats said the day's debate showed Republicans were more interested in making political gestures than in considering legislation that would help the weak economy. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., said the GOP motives were aimed at Election Day.

"A deliberate effort, now increasingly undisguised, to close the door on action to engender job creation and economic growth before the election," Levin said. "Nov. 6 is what is driving the Republican Congress. Politics, not people."

In its veto letter, the White House complained that the tax repeal would weaken the health care law, and said raising money by boosting subsidy refunds would be a tax increase on many families and discourage many of them from getting health coverage.

The bill also included provisions letting people get refunds of up to $500 if they don't use all the money in their medical flexible spending accounts, and allowing owners of some tax-favored health savings accounts to use the funds to buy over-the-counter medications.

Those two items would have a 10-year price tag of $8 billion.

Associated Press

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Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 goes on sale melding quad-core Ivy Bridge and GeForce GTX 660M

Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 goes on sale melding quadcore Ivy Bridge and GeForce GTX 660M

The Y580 led the avalanche of Lenovo IdeaPads unveiled at CES; its dependence on both Intel Ivy Bridge processors and Kepler-based NVIDIA graphics kept it out of the spotlight for some time, but it's now ready to ship out. The finished 15.6-inch laptop skews very clearly to gamers and other performance mavens. The range starts off with a quad 2.3GHz Core i7, a GeForce GTX 660M and 8GB of RAM. Any heavier outlays of cash upgrade the display resolution, optical drive and storage to as much as a 1080p screen, a Blu-ray combo drive and a 1TB hard drive with a companion 32GB SSD for good measure. None of them will win a contest for sheer portability, but a tight official price spread between $1,299 and $1,549 ($1,039 and $1,239 on sale) guarantees that it won't be hard to get exactly the PC you need to play Spec Ops.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 goes on sale melding quad-core Ivy Bridge and GeForce GTX 660M originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jun 2012 01:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wife says Clemens wasn't there for her HGH shot

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Debbie Clemens testified Friday that her husband was not present when she received a shot of human growth hormone from Roger Clemens' strength coach ? testimony that contradicts the star pitcher's chief accuser in the perjury trial.

But on cross-examination by the prosecution, she said of her husband's view of HGH, "I don't think he thought it was bad." She added, "It wasn't like doing heroin."

When a prosecutor asked if Clemens was mad when she told him about the HGH shot, she testified that his attitude was more that she wasn't "old enough yet" and didn't need it: "Why did you think you needed to do that?"

"I didn't think this was a bad thing," Debbie Clemens said. "And I still don't."

Debbie Clemens said she got the idea to take HGH from a front-page USA Today story in 2000 headlined, "Boomers believe they've found a fountain of youth in a syringe."

"A lot of people in Hollywood were doing it, and it was a youth drug," she said under questioning from Rusty Hardin, a lawyer for both Roger and Debbie Clemens. She said the newspaper story described it as a "youth drug, healthy and good." But the story also said that injecting HGH "is a practice that many doctors consider highly risky."

She said she mentioned the topic to the strength coach, Brian McNamee, who has emerged years later as the only person to give firsthand testimony that Roger Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career.

McNamee "talked about this being a good thing," she said, and gave her a shot a few days later ? without her husband's knowledge. She called it a spontaneous event.

"It wasn't really planned," she added. "It just happened."

McNamee, the government's key witness against Roger Clemens, testified last month that not only was the star baseball pitcher there, he had summoned McNamee to the couple's master bathroom in Houston to give Debbie Clemens the drug.

McNamee said she looked at her husband and said, "I can't believe you're going to let him do this to me," and Clemens responded, "He injects me. Why can't he inject you?"

Clemens is charged with lying to Congress when he denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Among the false statements he's alleged to have made are that he never used HGH and that McNamee injected his wife without Clemens' prior knowledge or approval.

Before taking the stand on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton gave Debbie Clemens a few minutes to talk to Hardin about her right not to incriminate herself, after which she came back and said she was ready to testify.

Hardin earlier had told Walton that the HGH injection happened so long ago that the statute of limitations would bar charges against her now.

Debbie Clemens testified briefly Thursday about the couple's time in Boston, where her husband pitched for the Red Sox from 1984 to 1996. She recalled that son Koby, born in 1986, was dubbed "most valuable baby" because his father was MVP that year.

For the benefit of the jury, Walton asked her what MVP meant.

"Most valuable baby," she said, prompting laughter in the courtroom ? including a rare laugh from her husband across the room. She quickly corrected her answer to most valuable player.

She also said that while she liked Boston, "the media could be very miserable. It was hard living a hero and a villain every other day, what they were creating."

After the court recessed, Roger Clemens came up behind his wife in the hallway and put his arm around her.

Earlier Thursday, McNamee's wife, Eileen, testified, but there was no embrace waiting for her, as the couple is going through a contentious divorce. She said she was furious with both her husband and Clemens when the former pitcher's lawyers allowed details of the McNamees' oldest son's diabetes to be revealed during a 2008 nationally televised news conference.

The news conference was part of a media blitz during which Clemens denied the doping allegations McNamee made about the pitcher in the then-just-released Mitchell Report on drugs in baseball. Hardin and Clemens played a taped phone call in which McNamee told Clemens, "My son is dying."

That wasn't true, Eileen McNamee said, although she had left her husband a message around that time about blood test results that weren't what they were supposed to be.

"Brian didn't bother to call me back. He called Roger and told him his son was dying," she testified.

Then her 10-year-old son heard the news conference, and "now my son thinks he's dying."

Prosecutor Courtney Saleski said Clemens could have kept the information about her son out of the news conference, but instead, "he played it for the world."

"Yes, he did," Eileen McNamee said. She acknowledged that she called her husband and told him to go after Clemens.

The next day, around 3 a.m., Brian McNamee retrieved the evidence that he said had been kept in and around a beer can inside a FedEx box for more than six years, the remnants of an alleged steroids injection of Clemens in 2001, which is the key physical evidence against Clemens.

"I asked him where he was going, and he said he was heading to his lawyers, and he was out the door," she recalled.

Brian McNamee had testified that he decided to turn over the evidence to federal authorities against Clemens "because of what he did to my son."

___

AP Sports Writer Joseph White contributed to this report.

___

Follow Fred Frommer on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ffrommer

Follow Joseph White on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JGWhiteAP

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Benefits Of Choosing An Australian Web Hosting And Domain ...

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It is for these and many more reasons that your business should have an effective presence through a professionally designed and maintained website.

For this, you just need to hire the services of an industry expert such as a?domain registration?Australia or web hosting Australia providing company. One of the biggest advantages of hiring such services would be complete professionalism in context of online presence and an Australian web hosting can help you in endless ways. By offering its expertise and resources, the provider of domain registration and cheap web hosting solutions can help you select a good domain name for the business and get the website optimized as per industry standards. The best part is that most of these service providers also offer customized website development packages that mean that you can get all solutions under one roof and all these services can be availed easily, with just a few clicks, at budget-friendly prices.

But it is important for you to observe a high sense of care and indulge into comprehensive analysis to compare various packages offered by different providers. This would not only help you choose the best service provider, but you would also be better positioned to get great domain name and?website hosting?deals and understand the market like never before. For this, it is highly suggested that you access different avenues of information, including feedback, reviews, testimonials, online forums, etc. that are shared by past and existing customers that would help you find out "truth" behind claims made by the service providers and if the package offered to you has everything to cover and satisfy all the requirements of your business. In short, stay informed to make the best decisions.

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Dentists Leery of Dental Therapists

Nearly 17 million U.S. children fail to see a dentist every year, according to the Pew Charitable Trust. Now, a new group of dental professionals, called dental therapists, is hoping to bring them treatment.

Dental therapists receive specialized training, including how to perform local anesthetic, cleanings and apply sealants in kids and adults. The hope is that the specialized groups trained in some dental procedures will ease the burden of the growing gap in dental care, particularly for children, the Los Angeles Times first reported Sunday.

"They say they're only going to do simple procedures but, oftentimes, you can't say whether it was simple or not until after you're finished and you decide it was simple," said Dr. Howard Gamble, president of the Academy of General Dentistry.

Gamble said even most dentists right out of dental school do not jump into their own private practice. Instead, many work under another dentist who has more experience for a few years.

Alaska set up the first dental therapy program in 2005 for people living in rural tribal areas.

The Minnesota legislature passed legislation in 2008 that created a task force to determine how a midlevel dental provider should be created in the next legislative session, said Dr. Karl Self, head of the department for Dental Therapy Programs at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry in Minneapolis.

Students enter the dental therapy program after completing a minimum of one year of prerequisite college course work. The full-time, 28-month program blends a solid dental clinical education, with the biological, behavioral, and social sciences, and the liberal arts, said Self.

Stigur Karlsson/Getty Images

California, New Hampshire, Oregon and Connecticut are states that are considering the practice.

"Our country's health-care system needs to continue to evolve in order to improve the health of its citizens," Self said. "This includes reducing health disparities as well as meeting the challenges of increasing access to care while increasing the quality of care and lowering the cost of care."

But Dr. Bill Calnon, president of the American Dental Association, said the solution isn't so simple.

"This is a very one-dimensional answer to an extremely complex problem," Calnon said. "People who are proposing this believe that more people treating individuals will solve the problem, but we're finding this won't necessarily help."

Neither Gamble nor Calnon believes the new wave of dental therapists will make general dentists lose business, but there are a "tremendous" number of barriers that should be examined, including education, cultural differences and geographical location, Calnon said.

"The vast majority of dental disease in this country is preventable," Calnon said. "That's good news and bad news. We have to figure out how to convince and educate people on oral health literacy."

Instead, to curb the growing gap of dental care in the United States, Gamble suggested education is key in teaching people how and when to brush and floss. It's also important to encourage people to put down the sugary foods and drinks. Gamble also suggested giving tax credits to dentists who work in underserved or rural populations.

But Self said dental therapy could be another tool in the arsenal to help kids get the dental care they need, particularly in the development years.

"While there is no one solution that will eliminate access to care issues or eliminate health disparities for our underserved populations, I believe that dental therapy can be an important piece that will contribute to improving those issues," said Self. "In Minnesota, legislation requires the dental therapist to work primarily in settings that serve low-income and underserved patients or in a dental health professional shortage area."

Self said the idea of midlevel professionals to provide basic dental work has been discussed for years. Now, he said, it's time to take action.

"It is encouraging that new and creative solutions are being discussed in every state," Self said. "But we need to do more than just talk, we need to implement some of these ideas."

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California cities look set to pass pension reform

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QNX unveils Jeep Wrangler reference vehicle for off-road Facebookers

QNX unveils Jeep Wrangle reference vehicle for offroad Facebookers

QNX Software has just peeled the price-sticker off a new Jeep Wrangler reference vehicle that showcases its latest "CAR 2" application platform. The hope is to show how well the system can let car manufacturers build in-vehicle entertainment and infotainment with a custom look, and lets developers create apps that look native to the vehicle. As you'd expect, there's a bunch of hands-free Facebook functionality, and novelties like sending updates about your in-car music choice, which the firm was also keen to show off. QNX ultimately hopes that this Jeep will inspire auto-makers to use the platform across different product lines, knowing that it can "fit in" with different vehicles. We just want to update our status while going 4 x 4.

Continue reading QNX unveils Jeep Wrangler reference vehicle for off-road Facebookers

QNX unveils Jeep Wrangler reference vehicle for off-road Facebookers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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