One in five coronary stent procedures done in the United States under Medicare are unnecessary and cost taxpayers around $800 million a year, revealed a recent report.
A coronary stent is a tiny tube inserted into a blocked heart artery to widen it so that blood can easily flow through. Between 2019 and 2021, U.S. hospitals performed more than 229,000 unnecessary coronary stent procedures at a rate of one per seven minutes, according to an Oct. 31 report from think tank Lown Institute. It estimated that one in five stents were placed unnecessarily in Medicare patients at a cost of $2.44 billion, which comes to roughly $800 million a year.
