Living in a rural state, access to health care can sometimes be hard. Whether the problem is distance, timing, or cost, health care options are often scarce. This reinforces the importance of programs designed to make health care more accessible, particularly for patients with limited resources or options.
For over three decades, the 340B Drug Pricing Program has provided many non-profit health care providers in West Virginia and nationwide with vital discounts on increasingly high-cost prescription drugs.
In particular, the savings generated from these discounts have played an invaluable role in supporting hospitals that serve a disproportionately high share of low-income patients who have health coverage through Medicaid or Medicare, and those who are underinsured or lack insurance altogether. This is – and always has been – the purpose of the 340B program.
For WVU Medicine St. Joseph’s Hospital, I cannot overstate the importance of the 340B program — it is an enabling program that strengthens our ability to serve our community and deliver quality care to our patients.
Now, as lawmakers in Washington consider new legislation that could enact a range of policy changes to the 340B program, it is critical that they work with hospitals like ours to preserve and strengthen the program in a way that does not diminish the value it provides to West Virginians and others across the country.
A bipartisan group of senators — including our own Senator Shelley Moore Capito — are considering reforms to the program and have requested information from 340B providers about how the program can be strengthened and modernized to address the evolving challenges of access to care for American patients.
We applaud lawmakers for their interest in ensuring the 340B program continues to play an effective role in the delivery of health care to patients and communities. That is particularly important to us at St. Joseph’s Hospital, as one-in-four patients who walk through our doors are on Medicaid, and an additional 45% are enrolled in Medicare.
The 340B program enables hospitals like ours to use savings from the program to support a range of other essential services and community programs.
At St. Joseph’s Hospital, that includes maintaining access to critical treatments and care for cancer patients close to home.
Prior to enrolling in the 340B program, inadequate government reimbursements threatened to undermine the future of infusion and oncology services at St. Joseph’s. Members of our community would have been forced to travel long distances to receive this level of care.
However, thanks to the 340B program, we have been able to keep the doors open at our infusion center and continue providing life-saving services for cancer patients, ensuring the rural residents in the communities we serve don’t have to travel long distances to access needed care.
Savings from the 340B program have also helped St. Joseph’s Hospital maintain consistent staffing levels to ensure patient access to vital services and avoid having to cut back on services as other nearby hospitals have had to do in recent years.
In particular, the 340B program has helped St. Joseph’s Hospital maintain labor and delivery services even while other hospitals have had to scale back women’s health due to unstable funding and inconsistent staffing. As a result, we are proud to be the primary provider of labor and delivery services to our area. Without 340B, we simply would not be able to provide this level of maternity care.
Like many 340B hospitals, St. Joseph’s rural setting means we rely on an extensive network of community and specialty pharmacies to fill the essential prescriptions of patients around the region. However, recent efforts by major drug companies to restrict access are creating significant financial and logistical challenges that threaten to undermine the program’s efficacy and, worse, limit patients’ access to their medications.
If these issues are not addressed, 340B hospitals throughout West Virginia will be restricted from working with community pharmacies, and our patients’ ability to access their medications and other services, supported by the 340B program, may be jeopardized.
As lawmakers consider changes to the 340B program, we urge Senator Capito and her colleagues to continue to work with us toward preserving and protecting a strong 340B program. Doing so will ensure facilities like WVU Medicine St. Joseph’s Hospital can continue to provide high-quality, comprehensive services and programs that meet the unique health care needs of the low-income, rural, and underserved patients and communities we serve.