JOINT-REPLACEMENT DEVICES A SOCIETAL BARGAIN (Orthopedics This Week)
We read a lot about the costs of medical technology to patient care but a closer look reveals that medical technology prices in the United States have remained consistently low for 20 years. According to Jeffrey R. Binder, president and CEO of Biomet Inc. and a member of the board of directors at the Advanced Medical Technology Association, writing for the online publication Phily.com, medical technology prices have grown at about an average annual rate of 1%—half the rate of prices in the overall economy.
Binder writes that spending on advanced medical technology, as a percentage of national health expenditures, has also remained virtually constant from 1992 to 2010. Total joint-replacement devices are going down in price. From 2007 to 2011 the average inflation-adjusted price paid by hospitals for artificial hips declined by 23% and the cost for knee implant devices fell by 17%.
Binder refers to studies that have shown that Medicare patients receiving total hip or knee replacements have nearly half the risk of death after seven years compared with a matched group of osteoarthritis patients who had not received t...
