How much do pacemakers cost?
A low-end pacemaker can cost approximately $5,000, and certain defibrillators can be up to $50,000. And their shelf life? It’s anywhere from five to 10 years, depending on how much it’s used. So when a patient is reliant upon them for use every minute of every day that battery life is five to six years; sometimes pacemakers are only used as a backup—and they can last 10 years. So what happens to most cardiac devices once a patient dies? Are they buried with them or retooled in some way? We asked funeral directors within a 50-mile radius of Ann Arbor what they do with these devices and got responses from 90 funeral homes. The majority of the funeral homes said their patients get buried with the devices. However, if you have a cremation it’s standard protocol to extract the device due to risk of device explosion during the crematorium process. So for anybody who has a device whose family requests cremation, that device will automatically be explanted. The funeral directors told us that’s
