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During his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama barely discussed his health care law. But that doesn’t mean Americans must remain in the dark about how the unpopular health law will impact each and every one of them. Heritage has compiled a series of videos that highlight how individuals and families will be affected by the new law.

Docs4PatientCare is proud to announce that two of its physician members are featured in this video series, whereby they explain how the new healthcare law will effect them and their patients.

Abbott Laboratories, maker of the rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, said it will cut about 1,900 jobs as part of a restructuring of its pharmaceutical business.

The cuts, amounting to 2 percent of the workforce, will help the Abbott Park, Illinois-based company cope with the U.S. health-care law passed last year, Abbott said in a statement today. The drugmaker said it would take charges of about $295 million in the coming years to transfer product manufacturing to new locations, including about $165 million this year.

The job cuts come “in response to changes in the healthcare industry, including U.S. health-care reform and the challenging regulatory environment,” Abbott said in the statement.

A year from now, the federal government will start collecting a new tax on medical devices from tongue depressors to imaging machines, thanks to the sweeping health-care overhaul that Democrats enacted in the spring of 2010. People in the industry say it’s already having an effect.

In November, citing the new tax, Stryker Corp. (SYK), whose products include artificial hips and knees, announced that it would let go about 1,000 of its workers. Earlier last year, Covidien Plc (COV), maker of surgical instruments, said it would lay off 200 workers in the U.S. and moveproduction to Costa Rica and Mexico. It, too, cited the tax.

Medical-device companies employ more than 400,000 Americans. Their wages are higher than the national average. The U.S. is a net exporter of medical devices.

The tax will change these numbers for the worse. It will be levied at 2.3 percent of sales; on average, profits make up less than 4 percent of sales in the industry. The AdvaMed study concludes, “The new 2.3 percent excise tax will roughly double their total tax bill and raise the average effective corporate income tax rate to one of the highest effective tax rates faced by any industry in the world.”