On average, safety net hospitals raised prices of oncology drugs 4.9 times their 340B purchased costs — and one breast cancer drug was hiked 11.3 percent — according to a September 2022 report from the Community Oncology Alliance.
The COA evaluated 49 top acute care hospitals with a disproportionately large number of uninsured and under-insured patients. Based on the assumption that these hospitals gained a 34.7 percent discount on the drugs, markups ranged from 3.2 percent to 11.3 percent, according to the report.
Cost variation happened within each hospital, too, depending on each patient's insurer.
"Some hospitals and hospital systems have come to treat 340B less as an assistance program and more as a profit-center," the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest's president, Peter Pitts, and its chief science policy officer, Robert Popovian, PharmD, wrote in a Sept. 12 report. "Today, there is ever-increasing evidence of the program’s out-of-control scope and a growing chorus from all corners of government who are finally beginning to see the 340B drug discount program for what it has become — a moneymaker for hospitals wrapped in the rhetoric of healthcare compassion."