Authored by Sylvia Xu, Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,
Hospitals that benefit from a government program intended to help safety-net institutions end up spending less on charity care than other hospitals, a new study has found, as federal policymakers move to reform the $244 billion initiative.
The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows certain healthcare providers to buy prescription drugs at a steep discount and sell them to patients at retail prices, keeping the difference to supplement their income.
The program was created more than 30 years ago to give a financial boost to rural hospitals, hospitals serving a disproportionate share of Medicaid patients, and other safety-net healthcare providers.
The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, allowed many more hospitals to join the program. At the same time, hospitals, physician practices, and other providers were consolidating into large healthcare conglomerates.
Within a few years, the 340B program swelled from a relatively small initiative by federal standards to a major revenue source bringing billions of dollars a year into increasingly larger healthcare systems.
Now, a report from the Pioneer Institute shows that hospitals participating in the program spend less on charity care than do other hospitals.
Income Up
The markup on those drugs netted the covered entities more than $142 billion that year, a margin shared with contract pharmacies and
