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In just over five months after the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) capped the prices of cardiac stents , violations of stent prices are already coming to light.
The NPPA made its first demand notice of ₹1.26 lakh from a hospital in Delhi-NCR on Thursday.
The hospital had been found to have overcharged two patients for stents that had been used on them on bills dated after February 14. The hospital had claimed that in both cases the angioplasty surgery had been conducted before the date from which the capped prices came into force.
“It is reiterated that… for the implementation of a price cap, the effective date is the date of billing and not the date of angioplasty. If a patient has angioplasty done before February 14, 2017, and billed on February 14, 2017, or after, the patient will mandatorily get the benefit of the revised prices,” the demand notice said.
In the two cases of overcharging, the hospital had billed the patients for ₹1.25 lakh and ₹60,000, respectively, against the ceiling price of ₹29,600 for each of them.
The Faridabad-based Metro Heart Institute with Multispecialty has been given 30 days to pay the overcharged amount to NPPA. The NPPA had capped the prices of bare-metal stents at ₹7,260 per unit and for drug-eluting stents, the price was fixed at ₹29,600 a piece, bringing down prices by as much as 80 per cent in some cases.
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