RealClearHealth: 340B Reform Isn’t a Policy Debate, It’s a Daily Crisis for Patients

By Kasia Mulligan, Patients Come First’s National Spokesperson

Throughout my career—from working in the Senate to leading policy reform campaigns for patients nationwide, I've seen the same problem play out repeatedly. As healthcare affordability remains one of the single biggest challenges facing everyday Americans, patients aren’t worried about the complicated backend mechanisms intended to make their prescriptions affordable. They care about one simple thing: whether they can afford the medicine they need at the pharmacy counter.

One of those mechanisms, the 340B Drug Pricing program, was designed to help low-income and underserved patients access discounted medicines. But for far too many, that isn’t the case. What began as a safety-net initiative has grown into a massive, multi-billion-dollar system—scaling past $100 billion in annual purchases—yet it operates with startlingly little transparency.

Patients shouldn’t need a degree in healthcare economics to track how discount dollars move between hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, and middlemen. However, because the program lacks basic visibility, we often can’t verify whether these steep discounts are actually lowering out of pocket costs for the vulnerable patients Congress created 340B to serve.

Read the full op-ed in RealClearHealth here.