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Obamacare Stifles Ohio Businesses

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Cleveland Clinic chief executive Toby Cosgrove, leader of the hospital that President Barack Obama praised in the Denver debate for doing "smart things," criticized Obamacare’s stifling effect on innovation, the Republican National Committee reported.

That comment came in an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2010.

While Obama praised the Clinic, Romney turned Obama’s praise around and cited the clinic as an example of private innovation.

Romney said about the Cleveland Clinic:

This is the private market, these are small, these are enterprises competing with each other, learning how to do better and better jobs. I used to consult to businesses, the hospitals and the health care providers. I was astonished at the creativity and the innovation that exists in the American people.

The RNC report also cited other complaints against Obamacare from Ohio medical businesses. For example, the report cited a news story from 2010 in which a medical device manufacturer stopped hiring because of a threat of a new tax on medical devices to fund Obamacare.

The report also references an editorial in the Columbus Dispatch from earlier this year that reported that the medical device manufacturing industry employs about 20,000 people in Ohio, with most of the employers being small businesses.

Since the Obamacare medical device tax "is on all revenue, not profits, small companies are particularly worried that they’ll be put out of business by it," the editorial reported.