"I would suggest that changes in the Affordable Care Act or repeal isn't going to have that much of an impact on the volume. It didn't have the impact coming in with the incremental volume. We haven't had the price increase we'd pass on from the device tax. I wouldn't see a big change in terms of volumes going out either . . . 

Maybe our hospital customer base is maybe a little bit healthier. They didn't take that incremental income and go buy more medical devices. If you look at medical device expenditure as a percentage of all healthcare costs, it stayed about the same. 

So, for the device industry, and my comments are specifically related to that, I wouldn't see frankly much of a change . . ."

On the device tax:

"I don't know if it would have come back regardless of the election outcome. I think it would have been in a state of continued suspension on a going-forward basis as opposed to an outright repeal. Given the outcome we've seen . . . the outright repeal is probably more likely . . .

I think the probability goes up that that goes away permanently, but it's been suspended anyway. So there won't be anything incremental, other than the cloud removed over everybody's head."

[Image courtesy of C.R. Bard]