The 340B Drug Pricing Program was designed to help eligible safety-net healthcare providers provide access to more affordable medicines for low-income and vulnerable patients. Unfortunately, patients today are not directly benefiting from the program amidst widespread abuse and misuse.
The 340B Program operates with little oversight, making it difficult to track whether billions of dollars in manufacturer-provided 340B discounts are reaching the patients the program originally intended to help.
Johnson & Johnson’s 2025 Issue Brief, The 340B Program: Missing the mark for patients, highlights the urgent need for transparent, patient-centered reforms to address abuses by large tax-exempt hospital systems, contract pharmacies and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
Despite being the second-largest federal prescription drug program, the 340B Program provides little direct benefit to patients. As the Program has rapidly expanded, charity care provided by disproportionate share hospitals (DSHs) has declined while profits have grown for large tax-exempt hospital systems and for-profit middlemen.
Without greater transparency and accountability, the program risks being continuously exploited, leaving vulnerable patients behind. Policymakers must ensure the program gets back to benefiting patients. This can be achieved by:
- Implementing reforms to increase transparency, accountability and oversight so that large health systems and PBMs are unable to divert discounts intended to benefit low-income and vulnerable patients.
- Eliminating duplicate discounts and diversion.
- Opposing policies that lock in and expand abuse, unintended consequences and misaligned incentives of the 340B Program.
The brief, The 340B Program: Missing the mark for patients, provides data, analysis and insights to help educate stakeholders on the abuses in the program and the need for patient-centered reforms.
Read the full brief here.