The 340B prescription drug discount program will be the subject of a hearing to be held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday, October 23.

The hearing will explore the growth of the program and whether it continues to achieve its objective of enabling safety-net providers to serve more low-income patients.

The 340B program was created by Congress in 1992 to help safety-net providers stretch their resources and provide more eligible patients with more comprehensive services.  Today, safety-net providers, including all community safety-net hospitals, are eligible for the program and view 340B as an integral part of their broader effort to serve communities with especially large numbers of low-income patients.

Pharmaceutical companies, on the other hand, maintain that the savings the program requires of them are used by providers in ways that do not involve helping more low-income patients.  In response, several of those companies have tried – unsuccessfully, so far – to change how they provide those discounts.

Meanwhile, Congress is worried about the program’s growth:  today, more than 5000 entities are eligible to participate.

Also, while the federal government does not incur any costs under the program, a recent Congressional Budget Office report suggested that “…the 340B program encourages behaviors… that tend to increase federal spending.”

The nation’s community safety-net hospitals view the 340B program as a vital tool in supporting their ability to serve the large numbers of low-income residents of the communities they serve.  It enables them, and other providers like them, to maximize their resources when working to serve their communities, improving access to high-cost prescription drugs for low-income patients and putting additional resources into the hands of qualified providers so those providers can do more for their low-income patients:  provide more care that their patients might otherwise not be able to afford, offer more services that might otherwise be unavailable in those communities, and do more outreach into communities consisting primarily of low-income-residents.

Learn more about 340B and the upcoming hearing from the Washington Post article “Drug discounts under the microscope” and this notice from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which includes the date and time of the hearing, lists the scheduled witnesses, and offers a link to live video of the proceedings.