Kerry lauds Baucus for medical imaging help

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON – US Senator John Kerry today thanked Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus for helping shield Massachusetts medical companies from millions of dollars of budget cuts.

Kerry, a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, worked with Baucus to kill a proposal that would have cost the state jobs by cutting Medicare payments for medical imaging services by $400 million nationally, his office said.

“Medical imaging accounts for more than 10,000 jobs in Massachusetts, with even bigger spin-off contributions to our state’s economy,” Kerry said in a statement. “Whether it’s the innovators who build cutting edge machines or physicians and hospitals that rely on them, medical imaging is an important sector in Massachusetts and we couldn’t have afforded this cut.”

Kerry praised Baucus, a fellow Democrat from Montana, for keeping an open mind and considering Massachusetts’ economic circumstances in order to find a “fairer way to pay for trade assistance for workers.”

“I’m very grateful to the chairman for his flexible and collaborative approach,” the senator said.

Lowering Medicare reimbursement for medical imaging means that doctors would hang on to their old equipment longer, which translates into fewer patients getting access to the newest technologies that are better at finding early-stage diseases, Kerry said.

The proposed imaging cuts would have resulted in job losses because manufacturers would have been forced to respond to decreased demand by laying-off workers and shutting down factories and research facilities, companies warned.

In Massachusetts, thousands of jobs are directly tied to medical imaging technology, including 3,093 employees with Siemens; nearly 5,000 employees with Phillips; over 1,000 employees with GE Healthcare; and 550 employees with Shields Health Care Group, which is based in Quincy and has 30 facilities across the state.