Price capping: High-end stents disappear from hospitals

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 24

High quality new generation coronary stents being manufactured by top foreign firms are gradually disappearing from city hospitals. 

Renowned institutes like Ganga Ram Hospital and Metro Heart Institute, which handle much of the national capital’s load of coronary stenting procedures, have begun reporting shortages saying offshore firms like Abbot and Boston Scientific are rationing supplies of high generation stents due to price capping by India though first generation stents, pioneered much earlier, are available.

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Dr RR Mantri, cardiologist with Ganga Ram Hospital, says stents of top quality, the ones with the capacity to dissolve in the body, are not available at prices capped by the government. Senior cardiologist acclaimed for angioplasties Dr Purshottam Lal, who heads Metro Heart Institute at Noida, says he had predicted these shortage to the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority when the matter of stent price capping was being debated.

“You cannot bracket all kinds of stents in one category. At my institute, patients ask for Boston Scientific or Abbot stents to be implanted to unclog arteries. High generation imported stents come at a price. They will not come at such a low price. The companies will pull back and the market will shift to countries willing to procure these life-saving devices at fair prices which the makers demand. That is not to say you should not cap the prices, but there has to be price differential depending on the stent quality. You can’t equate the quality of Indian-made stents with foreign-made stents,” Dr Lal said.

“The Health Ministry told the NPPA that the quality of all stents is the same. I want to ask them on what basis did they reach the conclusion? Where is the clinical data and research which says all stents, Indian and imported, are similar quality? Let the Government make that data public,” Dr Lal told The Tribune, saying stents are life-savers and cannot be treated casually under drug pricing. 

He called for fair pricing based on quality which is determined by research.

Meanwhile, the NPPA has ordered all hospitals to make coronary stents available at recently capped prices even as patients begin to face a shortage of high generation stents with cardiologists saying the manufacturing firms are blocking supplies following recent stent price fixation.

The NPPA recently fixed the ceiling price of bare metal stents (BMS) at Rs 7,260 as against Rs 45,000 previously and of most used drug eluting stents (DES) at Rs 29,600 as against Rs 80,000 to Rs 1,75, 000 previously.