Cardiac stents prices to fall by Tk15,000-20,000 from September

Good news is around the corner for heart patients as the price of cardiac stents are set to fall – from maximum retail price of Tk84,800 to Tk64,754 for one of the most used stents – through reducing taxes and revising the pricing formula.

The new price will be effective from 1 September.

Abbott Laboratories and Boston Scientific -- two leading producers and suppliers of cardiac stents – agreed to reduce the base prices during a meeting at the Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA) this noon.

The base price of Abbot Laboratories Xience Prime, one of the highest used stents in Bangladesh, will be reduced from $561 to $425.

Besides, the base price of another stent of this company, Xpedition, will also be reduced in phases to $600 from the current $830. 

As a result, the maximum retail price would be reduced to Tk1.81 lakh, even without tax reductions. 

Similarly, the base price of Promus Primer, another highly used stent produced by Boston Scientific, will be reduced to Tk74,411 from the current price of Tk86,500 without reducing taxes and revising the pricing formula.

The maximum retail price of the cardiac stents are fixed by adding taxes, other costs and profit of the local distributors. For this, the DGDA has set up the 1.42 markup in 2017.

In November last year, the DGDA hiked the price due to the appreciation of Taka against the US dollar which put pressure on the patients' expenditure.

Each year, as many as 45,000 cardiac stents are used in different hospitals in the country.