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Posted: March 12, 2022 12:01 AM
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President Biden’s call for Congress to pass legislation to control drug prices in his State of the Union address provides a good opportunity to note a law that is already in the books that help prevent drug manufacturers from raising prices. Since lawmakers are prepared to debate the proposal, it is a law to be defended. Congress created a 340B drug pricing program in 1992 through a bipartisan law that proposed a simple tradeoff. If pharmaceutical companies wanted access to for-profit Medicare and Medicaid drug formulations, they had to agree to provide certain external drugs at discounts when selling their safety-net in hospitals, health centers and clinics. Nearly 30 years later, more than 700 pharmaceutical manufacturers have signed contracts to do just that. 340B Safety-Net reduces the price paid for outpatient medications at hospitals, community health centers, and public health clinics. These providers use savings from the manufacturer’s discount to cover the care costs of low-income patients and those living in rural communities. Pharmaceutical companies – and not taxpayers – fund this care for millions of patients who would not otherwise be able to care for them. Congress has developed a 340B program to help security-net providers “expand as scarce federal resources as possible …
The post Needs Protection of Drug Pricing Program first appeared in Populist Press © 2022.