One of those important governmental healthcare programs is known as the Charitable Medicines Program (340B). The 340B program began in the early 1990s when Congress wanted to require pharmaceutical manufacturers, as a condition of benefiting from government programs, to donate at low or no cost prescription drugs to charitable hospitals. That’s exactly what’s going on now with the charitable medicines program known as “340B.”For a while, the program worked as intended. The definition of a “charitable hospital” was never well-defined in law, and today 57% of all hospitals participate in the drug discount program. Every Congressman has a hospital in their district, and the 340b program must be used by the hospitals as Congress mandated.

Source: New York Times August 12, 2023 13:05 UTC