Medical device payback, Conflavoro PMI Sanità: "Do you want your money back? Then send us a return."

ROME. "Want your money back? Return it to us." This is the message chosen by Conflavoro PMI Sanità for its new Medtech Payback awareness campaign, launched today on major social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Threads, Pinterest, and Instagram. At the heart of the campaign is a provocation: stents, heart valves, prosthetics, and other medical devices are being symbolically "taken away" from patients. This intentionally forceful gesture draws attention to the concrete significance of supplies to the National Health Service: behind every device are patients, treatments, professionals, and companies that design, produce, and guarantee technologies essential to healthcare.

Conflavoro PMI Sanità thus once again denounces what it calls the "Medtech Payback paradox": companies that, after years of supplying and seeing their devices used by public healthcare facilities, find themselves faced with demands for reimbursement that, in some cases, can exceed the profits actually earned on the supplies.

According to the Italian medtech association, the mechanism risks "putting small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector in particular in difficulty," with consequences for their financial stability, employment, and the continuity of supplies to the National Health Service. "Companies cannot be asked for refunds that risk erasing years of work and jeopardizing their very survival," emphasizes Gennaro Broya de Lucia, president of Conflavoro PMI Sanità. The issue, he adds, "is not just economic: when a company in the sector closes or is forced into liquidation, the ability of the Italian supply chain to continue providing devices and technologies to the healthcare system is also called into question."

The campaign is aimed specifically at journalists, parliamentarians, and healthcare procurement managers, whom the association urges to maintain high levels of attention on the issue and to intervene in the next 2027 budget.

The objective set by Conflavoro PMI Sanità is clear: to eliminate the Medtech Payback and prevent its effects from leading to a wave of closures and layoffs, with irreversible repercussions on Italy's productive and employment system and, indirectly, on the National Health Service's ability to ensure continuity and quality of care.

The story of Medtech Payback is also told in the book of the same name promoted by Conflavoro PMI Sanità, “Medtech Payback,” available on Amazon.