Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
from Sakthi Prasad:
Real Estate – To invest or not
Everyone of us has our own ideas about a dream home and usually wonder if it makes a good investment or not.
But for Abhijit Mukherjee, president of the pharma firm Dr. Reddy’s, the choice is very clear -- He is not a big fan of real estate investment.
While speaking to Reuters journalists at the India Investment Summit in Bangalore, Mukherjee cited the American example of a recent real estate crash and wondered whether India, too, is headed in the same direction. He said buying a house and holding it for value appreciation over a number of years is not a good idea.
Notwithstanding his skepticism, he said he is thinking of changing his apartment. But he was quick to add that it is not a very exciting investment.
Mukherjee would rather park his money in a high-risk, high-reward investment like equities.
Health reform…big in Europe too
U.S. healthcare reform is top of everybody’s agenda right now — but Barack Obama isn’t the only government leader chasing a new deal.
“If you are talking healthcare reform, it’s our daily life in Europe,” Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Sorensen told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.
“Prices are being impacted, there is parallel trade — all kinds of tricks that are aimed at reducing cost. Europe is very anemic at the moment.”
European governments have been pushing back against rising healthcare bills for years with a range of measures including price cuts, and ballooning budget deficits in the wake of the financial crisis are not helping one bit.
Beckman hopes reform fees go up in smoke
Have healthcare companies sunk as far as controversial tobacco companies in the public eye? One medical equipment maker thinks so.
Makers of medical tests, implants and other devices face anywhere from $2 billion-a-year in industry-wide taxes in the House of Representatives’ health reform bill passed on Saturday to $4 billion-a-year under a Senate version. The Senate measure’s tax is not deductible and would be applied much like the tobacco settlement from cigarette makers years ago, said Beckman Coulter CEO Scott Garrett.
“That hurts, that stings to be treated like the tobacco industry,” he told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.
It could hurt customers — hospitals, patients and others — too. Companies have said they would have pass along any higher costs from the tax directly onto users.
Garrett, whose company makes clinical diagnostic tests as well as other research instruments, said he was “rooting for the House version,” which is tax deductible and phases in the charges starting in 2013.
Live blog at Reuters Health Summit
A dozen Reuters reporters are covering the annual Reuters Health Summit in New York, featuring speakers from the world’s leading healthcare companies, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, plus top insurers and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Follow the action as it happens:
Good health is a fundamental human right. It’s not a commodity to be bought and sold. Our children and our loved ones are not animals to be treated with disregard or who must qualify for care that is a basic human right.
Our senators will demonstrate by way of their vote where their hearts are with regard to the interests of the citizenry. Do they value the interests of the citizenry as their highest priority, or do they value profit over and above the lives of those they are charged with representing?
We already know where Lieberman stands. He does not value the people. Rather he values money and profit over the lives of your children and loved ones. How many other senators will be so bold as to tell the people to shut up and take it? My guess is many more.
If people want government to look after their interests as citizens, then they need to be vocal about it. And they must vote out those who value business concerns over human ones.
Also on the agenda should be the stripping of citizenship from corporations. They are businesses not citizens. Put them in their place.
