As the Trump administration prepares to force its Most Favored Nation price controls on drug makers, a major U.S. lobbying group is pushing for a change to drug discounts law that would necessitate a taxpayer-funded bailout of rural hospitals to the tune of at least $100 billion.
That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a new report from the American Hospital Association, which found that the 340B Drug Pricing Program provided almost $100 billion in total benefits to 1,166 rural hospitals in 2022, a 47 percent increase from 2019.
The report underlines exactly how reliant on the program — which advocates have long touted as a zero-taxpayer dollar solution to rural health funding challenges — hospitals in red America really are.
It also puts a specific figure on the size of a taxpayer-funded bailout that would inevitably be sought, were the program to disappear — though advocates note the hit to taxpayers would be even higher than $100 billion if facilities other than purely rural hospitals suffered financially from the curtailment of 340B.
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