The medtech industry will lose a champion in Congress when Senate Finance Panel Chair Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, retires at the end of the 2018 congressional session. Author of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Children's Health Insurance Program law, Hatch has been a perennial supporter of device-tax repeal, introduced market-based pricing for lab test reimbursements, and sponsored deep cuts in taxes for corporations in tax reform legislation signed into law just last month. Might former Massachusetts governor and failed 2008 US presidential candidate Mitt Romney run for the soon-to-be vacated seat?
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has announced plans to retire at the end of the current legislative session this year, most likely in December. He will leave big shoes to fill on the panel that handles Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, tax reforms and trade issues.
Hatch is 83, and ready for retirement, he said when announcing his retirement on Jan. 2. "I've always been a fighter. I was an amateur boxer in my youth, and...