Now buy your stent at rock-bottom price while pharma companies face the heat

Here is a piece of good news for all the cardiac patients and also the ones who are close to an angioplasty. But then, here is also a bad news for some of the pharmaceutical companies. All these are happening at the same time in a major development as a part of the ongoing crackdown measures. On Tuesday, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) issued a notification capping coronary stent prices much below the existing prices, in an effort to check unethical profiteering and exploitative pricing. 

The move comes almost two months after coronary stents were brought under the schedule 1 of the national list of essential medicines on December 21 to start the process of price fixation. A stent is a tiny expandable metal scaffold to open up narrowed arteries to ensure blood flow, thereby preventing heart attacks. On an average, a bare metal stent costs about Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000, while a drug eluting stent (DES) ranges between Rs 25,000 to Rs 80,000. The new prices for stents have been fixed under para 19 of the drug (price control) order, which takes into consideration the extraordinary circumstances for fixing of prices of drugs.

The drug pricing regulator, NPPA has now capped the prices of bare metal stent at Rs 7,260 and drug eluting stent (DES) & bio-degradable stents at Rs 29,600. Both the prices are exclusive of value added tax. NPPA also asked hospitals utilising coronary stents to separately mention the cost of the coronary stent along with its brand name, name of the manufacturer and other details, in their billing to the patients. Besides, it also stated that the medicines and devices listed in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) must be sold at the price fixed by NPPA. 

About 60 per cent of the market for stents is shared by the multi-national pharma companies such as Abbott, Medtronics, Meril Life Sciences and Boston Scientific. The medical devices industry which is opposing the control on the stent prices, said the decision will stifle access of innovative and advanced therapies for patients. The health care industry had been lobbying hard to block the government's move to cap stents prices as it would hurt margins.