Our Corrupt Markets

Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a perfusion system used in open heart surgery has changed its terms of service, so now hospitals will be forbidden from doing any maintenance on these machines.

So, they are going to f%$# hospitals just like John Deere f%$#s farmers.

The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals’ repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said.

The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the “discontinuation of certification classes,” meaning it “will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components.”

This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company “will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components.”

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Hospitals are increasingly being pushed into signing maintenance contracts directly with the manufacturers of medical equipment, which means that repair technicians employed by hospitals can no longer work on many devices and hospitals end up having to employ both their own repair techs and keep up maintenance contracts with device manufacturers. 

“One of my fears is that if a device goes down, we’re going to be subject to their field engineers’ availability,” a source who works in hospital medical device repair told 404 Media. 404 Media agreed to keep the source anonymous because they were not authorized by their hospital to speak to the media. “They may not be able to get here that same day or the next day, and if you’ve got people waiting to get an open-heart surgery, you have to tell them ‘Oh, the machine’s down, we’re going to have to postpone this.’ That’s detrimental to a patient who has a life-altering, very serious thing that they’re having to cancel and reschedule.” 

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This specific ventilator repair crisis during COVID led experts at Harvard Medical School to write that “For years, manufacturers have curtailed the ability of hospitals to independently repair and maintain medical equipment by preventing access to the necessary knowledge, software, tools, and parts” in a piece calling for right-to-repair legislation. The FTC, meanwhile, suggested in a report that medical device manufacturers sometimes charge two-to-three times what an independent repair tech would charge for the same repair. 

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Medical equipment manufacturers have strongly lobbied against right to repair legislation all over the country, and have been successful in getting medical devices exempted from right to repair legislation by claiming that the machines are too sensitive and complex to be repaired by anyone besides the manufacturer. The medical device giant AdvaMed, for example, says “the risk to patient safety is too high.”

What AdvaMed is really saying is that, "The risk to senior executive stock options are too high."

We no longer have a free market in America, we have lobbyist driven looting.

This ain't gonna end until we start arresting and imprisoning senior executives who do this.