This past weekend Stryker Corp., a leading medical device and supply manufacturer, announced layoffs of 5% of its workforce as a direct result of ObamaCare.

To help finance Obama's historic leap into the glorious collectivist future, medical device companies, both manufacturers and suppliers, have been assessed a 2.3% excise tax. The cost to the industry has been estimated at $20 billion. (Though experience teaches us that such estimates tend to be on the low side.)

This translates into the loss of 1,170 jobs from Stryker's international workforce, many of them specialist positions that will render it very difficult for workers to find new jobs.

An irony here lies in the fact that the leading corporate heir of the company is a major supporter of Barack Obama. Jon Stryker contributed no less than $2 million to the Obama-related super-PAC Priorities USA Action and $66,000 to Obama and the Democrats. Stryker has been involved in funding a number of liberal causes, giving as much as a quarter-billion in support of gay marriage and environmentalism. Thomas Sowell pointed out that younger generations tend to throw away the money that the older generations earned. Stryker would appear to playing out this role in detail.

What this means for the industry is less research, less investment, and fewer chances taken. It's possible that the vast wave of medical innovation of the past half-century that has eased so much in the way of human suffering is being brought to an end. This possibility alone should have curtailed Obama's shortsighted and ill-contrived scheme at the start. It ain't just Twinkies that we're going to miss.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H.L. Mencken