This week’s contributor is Paula Chatterjee, a physician and assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on improving the health of low-income patients and evaluating policies related to safety-net health care delivery and financing.

Low-income patients face many barriers to care, one of which is the high cost of prescription medications. The 340B program lets certain hospitals and clinics (like federally qualified health centers) receive discounts on outpatient medications. They can then use those savings to provide medication and additional care for little to no charge to low-income patients. However, policymakers and other stakeholders have raised concerns that the 340B program might not be reaching the patients it was designed to support.

A recent paper in the American Journal of Managed Care by Sayeh Nikpay*, Gabriela Garcia, Hannah Geressu and Rena Conti sheds light on one of the latest examples of 340B mistargeting: so-called contract pharmacies. These are retail pharmacies that fill 340B prescriptions and split the savings with the hospital or clinic. These relationships have been on the rise, with hospitals and clinics arguing they make it more convenient for patients to get their prescriptions. Given their growth, the authors looked at whether contract pharmacies were more likely to open up in areas where low-income and uninsured people live.

They found the pattern was different for pharmacies contracting with 340B clinics vs. 340B hospitals:

• The number of counties with a pharmacy contracted with a 340B clinic grew from 20.8% to 64.8% over the past decade. Counties with higher poverty rates were more likely to gain a clinic-contracted pharmacy.
• The number of counties with hospital-contracted pharmacies grew much more (from 3.2% to 76.3%), but those counties had fewer uninsured residents and were less likely to be medically underserved.

The researchers acknowledge that counties may be an imperfect geographical area to represent a pharmacy’s market and that they were unable to collect information on how many (if any) 340B prescriptions a pharmacy actually filled.

Nonetheless, their results reveal a mismatch between where the 340B program is growing and where low-income patients live, especially for pharmacies contracting with 340B hospitals. The authors argue that any 340B policy changes should take these differences between hospitals and clinics into account.

Despite decades of policies designed to bolster the safety-net, it remains perennially reliant on a patchwork of subsidies that are often mistargeted. This study adds to a growing body of work highlighting the opportunity to improve the 340B program so that it achieves its intended goal of improving access for low-income patients.

*Sayeh Nikpay is the Tradeoffs’ Research Editor. She had no editorial input on this column.