Cook Medical President Kem Hawkins will keep his remarks 100 percent upbeat today at the opening of the company’s new $19 million manufacturing facility in Canton, Ill., where he’ll share speaking duties with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., among others.
“This day is dedicated to things that are positive to this community,” Hawkins said. “There won’t be one negative word spoken.”
But Hawkins said he also is scheduled to meet with Durbin privately after the ceremony, where he intends to deliver a message that the senior Illinois senator may not find so positive.
It is this: Unless the Senate follows the lead of the House and votes to repeal the 2.3 percent medical devices excise tax contained in the Affordable Care Act, Cook Medical will not build any more plants in the U.S.
Hawkins said if the tax goes into effect next year, as scheduled, the private, family-owned company based in Bloomington will be forced to use revenue that would have financed expansion to preserve the jobs of current employees.
“We will be protecting our employees in the U.S. and looking abroad for growth,” Hawkins said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “We have been working diligently in all our states with plants to try and have people understand there are consequences for these actions.”
The excise tax on medical devices was included in the ACA as one means to pay for expansion of health care coverage for millions of currently uninsured Americans. Cook and other makers of medical devices have said the tax will move manufacturing jobs overseas and impede new product development.
“I have never looked on this as Republican and Democrat,” said Hawkins. “It has nothing to do with parties. It has everything to do with jobs and the economy.”
If Durbin needs a illustration of what Cook believes is at stake, Hawkins can point to the Canton plant opening today, or another $20 million Cook plant that opened two years ago in the same town.
Cook has estimated the impact of the new tax on the company will be approximately $20 million a year — the cost of one of those Canton plants, which combined will employ about 350 people.
Hawkins said Cook has shelved plans for five additional U.S. manufacturing facilities until it sees what is going to happen with the proposed excise tax. None of those plants had been announced, and Hawkins did not say where the company had been thinking of building them. However, he did say that Bloomington was not among possible locations.
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http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2012/08/31/news.cook-shelves-plans-for-new-plants-in-us.sto
