ROME. "Regions must acknowledge a reality: they will not be able to recover any more money from small and medium-sized Italian medical device companies. Persisting in this direction means jeopardizing the survival of hundreds of companies that have already suffered an unsustainable tax burden." This is what Gennaro Broya de Lucia, president of Conflavoro PMI Sanità, the Italian medtech association, said in his remarks on the medical device payback issue.
"Our companies," he explains, "have been required to cover regional healthcare spending overruns for the years 2015-2018 by offsetting credits accrued for supplies regularly ordered, manufactured, and even delivered to hospitals. Essentially, companies that honored their contracts have seen resources taken away to cover budget imbalances resulting from decisions in which they had no say." "This is a profoundly unfair mechanism," Broya de Lucia insists, "because it places the responsibility for spending decisions made by the Regions on businesses. This approach may be supported by large pharmaceutical groups, but it risks being lethal for SMEs with local roots."
According to Conflavoro PMI Sanità, "many companies are considering liquidating their businesses." "If these businesses close," Broya de Lucia warns, "we will lose production, jobs, and competition, but also the ability to guarantee our hospitals medical devices produced and distributed nationwide. And the damage to the National Health Service will be far greater than the sums they are seeking to recover."
Meetings with representatives of the relevant regions and ministries are planned in the coming days. "It's essential that those bodies understand that persisting with requests to SMEs doesn't mean recovering new resources: it risks shutting down businesses. At this point, we must ask ourselves: what's the point of this operation? Who benefits from it?" Conflavoro PMI Sanità is therefore calling for an "immediate discussion with SMEs in the sector" to "identify a solution that will allow companies to overcome this phase and continue to guarantee products, employment, and a presence in the region."
"The sustainability of regional healthcare budgets," Broya de Lucia concludes, "is a matter of public spending and cannot be retroactively passed on to a single category of businesses, unrelated to the decisions that led to the overruns. Medtech SMEs have already paid the price. Asking them for more risks shutting them down. And businesses that close no longer generate revenue: they destroy value."
