GE's Dismal Earnings a Warning for Other Medical Device Companies

When it comes right down to the brass tacks...who's paying for all of this...medical device companies have to generate revenue somewhere...by selling the product to healthcare professionals and hospitals...if sales are down...well it's not easy to figure that one out...there are basically no standards out there anymore, just one company competing against another for the best product(s) to create better profits and healthcare along the line somewhere...we live in an exciting time whereby new devices and technology are being introduced almost daily, things that have the potential of either saving or extending our lives, but once more, where's the capital to keep this going...is the bottom going to eventually fall out...Medicare has no real interest in investing in healthcare, but more emphasis is on cutting costs...but there's a hitch with this philosophy...and the technology side is suffering...no 2 ways about it...and we have somewhere along the line lost the balance between the 2...you can have lifesaving new technologies emerge and work their way quickly into the healthcare market, but again someone has to pay for it, otherwise we will eventually produce a "stock pile of devices, technology and drugs" that will not serve to benefit our overall population...

I see this too as a wake up call for all areas of healthcare...the physicians have a huge challenge today in trying to make a solid care giver's decision on which area of treatment to follow, as both the patient and the MD do not want to miss out on any new devices or treatment plans that will save a fellow human being...soon there will be DNA results in the charts, changing the way medication is prescribed...this will result in a large change in the way medication is prescribed by your physician and there is a definite lack of physicians who even have the initial training on how to bring this into a complete plan for a patient's plan...and then there's the item of mistrust...and that is the area of opportunists who perhaps use healthcare information for their own self profiting and we all know what that is all about with insurers and others along the way...so in summary where is the balance in health care...are we all walking on the same path? Something to think about as the various fragments continue to grow and funds continue to diminish...are we in the business to help our fellow man/woman or have we forgotten what the focus of good healthcare is all about? BD

General Electric (GE) shocked Wall Street with its first disappointing earnings report in years, mostly due to problems in its financial business, but GE Healthcare's 17% drop in first quarter profits on a slight revenue decline should be giving investors in medical device companies pause. What does GE's explanation that "Healthcare earnings were impacted by a difficult U.S. environment and continued regulatory shipping restrictions on the surgical supplies business" mean for Johnson & Johnson (JNJ),Covidien (COV) and Intuitive Surgical (ISRG)?

While ISRG has rallied impressively since my bearish review, GE says that community hospitals have cut capital expenditures significantly due to the credit markets crisis. This is bad news for all medical devices companies.