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Healthcare policy is a tangled mess of federal and state programs, mostly well intentioned but often contradictory or even counterproductive. One of these is the federal 340B drug purchasing program. This massive but little-known program has become a flashpoint in state legislatures, but what is needed is federal reform. Thankfully, the Trump Administration and several members of Congress are working to expose and reduce 340B abuses. 

A recent column in The Kansas City Star points out that U.S. Senator Jerry Moran is “working to identify reforms that increase program integrity while protecting access for the patients who truly need it.” The article by Chris Chastain, who works for the Kansas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, points to some of the problems with 340B and proposed fixes: “legislation such as the 340B ACCESS Act being considered in the House offers commonsense solutions improving reporting requirements, ensuring savings benefit patients, and curbing practices that divert resources away from care.”

Created in 1992 as part of a larger bill, 340B forces drug makers to sell certain outpatient prescription drugs to certain medical providers at deep discounts. (This was done because, two years earlier, Congress had passed a law that prevented manufacturers from offering their own discounts.) The original program was very limited, but the Obama Administration expanded it to include major hospital networks and an unlimited number of pharmacies. Suddenly, 340B has become a source of windfall profits for hospitals and a subsidy for the woke agenda in some hospitals and clinics. 

The 340B program was always flawed. It’s a big-government fix to problems created by earlier big-government schemes. Obama turned it into a massive hidden subsidy program. Thankfully, members of Congress like Sen. Moran are asking the right questions. State legislators need to back them up with their own investigations, and encourage federal reformers to act against 340B abuses.