Medicare pays for ~1 million implant procedures a year and does not know, at the product level, what it bought. No brand. No model. No manufacturer. The claim has no field for it.
The $25B number floating around is in the right range. Joints: $4-5B. Spine hardware: $2-3B. Cardiac rhythm: ~$3B. Transcatheter heart valves alone: ~$3B. All outside any negotiation framework.
Hospitals buying the same hip implant paid anywhere from $4,500 to $8,000 - a 78% spread. The 90th percentile hospital paid 2.1x the 10th percentile for knees. Confidentiality clauses in contracts keep this data 15 years old.
Japan’s device pricing formula explicitly excludes the US price from its international benchmark - because the US number is too far above any reasonable average. That is not commentary. It is in the formula.
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