The vast majority
Prices that hospitals pay for cardiac implant devices are two to six times higher in the United States than in Europe, according to analysis of a large hospital panel survey.
U.S. hospitals had an estimated mean cost of $670 for a bare-metal stent in 2014, compared with $120 in Germany, and the mean costs for dual-chamber pacemakers that year were $4,200 in the United States and $1,400 in Germany, which had lower costs for cardiac devices than the other three European countries – United Kingdom, France, and Italy – included in the study, Martin Wenzl, MSc, and Elias Mossialos, MD, PhD, reported in Health Affairs.
France generally had the highest costs among the European countries, with Italy next and then the United Kingdom. The estimated cost of bare-metal stents was actually higher for French hospitals ($750) than for those in the United States, and Italy had mean prices similar to the United Sates for dual-chamber implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. The prices of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators and cardiac resynchronization devices with defibrillating function were the other exceptions, with the United Kingdom similar to or higher than the United States, said Mr. Wenzl and Dr. Mossialos, both of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The analysis of data from Decision Resources Group’s Marketrack hospital surveys also showed significant variation between the hospitals in each country, with the exception of France, where payments are based on the specific device rather than the procedure and the system “creates weak incentives for hospitals to negotiate lower prices,” they said. In most of the device categories, “variation between hospitals in each country was similar to variation between countries,” they wrote, adding that prices in general “were only weakly correlated with volumes purchased by hospitals.”
The study was supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund. The investigators did not disclose any possible conflicts of interest.
SOURCE: Wenzi M, Mossialos E. Health Aff. 2018;37[10]:1570-77. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2017.1367.