Biomedical: payback for companies closer to a 500 million rebate

A discount of almost 500 million for companies, with the government guaranteeing 350 million and the regions waiving 120 million in receipts. A possible solution, albeit not a definitive one, to the tangled payback issue on medical devices, which for biomedical companies currently still has a hefty bill of around one billion euro for the years from 2015 to 2018 alone, is approaching. At an extraordinary Conference of the Regions convened precisely to discuss the proposal put on the table by Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, the governors reportedly reached a unanimous agreement to settle the three-year past debt. An agreement that would then be sent to the MEF, which would now have to write the regulations.

The Regions' agreement should in some way follow what the Economy proposed after the meetings at the sector table at the Mef in recent weeks with the companies and the regional representatives themselves. The mechanism, the details of which are still to be outlined and which could soon be included in the omnibus mini-decree on which the government is working, envisages that in order to reduce the amount to be borne by the companies - as has already happened in the past, raising the total to be paid from 2 billion to 1 billion - there will be a direct intervention by the government, which will put up 350 million, while the regions should give up 120 million (they are the ones who collect the payback on medical devices from the companies). When all is said and done, therefore, about 526 million would be borne by the industries, with a possible exemption for the smallest companies that have a turnover of less than 5 million a year and that, with the payback blow, would risk closing down immediately.

For now, nothing has been decided for the following years, and in particular for the years 2019-2023, which would see the bill for companies rise to around 3 billion: hence the request of the sector - 4600 companies for a market worth 18 billion - to cancel this mechanism for the following years. A mechanism that, it must be said, was introduced in 2015 by the Renzi government and provides that companies supplying medical devices must pay back 50 per cent of the deviations from the spending ceiling, set at 4.4 per cent of the National Health Fund. The payback, however, remained unimplemented until the summer of 2022, when the then government led by Mario Draghi decided in extremis to pull it out. Since then it has been a sort of ordeal between extensions and a cut in half of the bill for companies that have also tried the road of appeals to the TAR.