Dr. Oz Just Fired a $4.5 Billion Shot at Big Hospital Hypocrisy

by Phil Kerpen

Excerpt from the Washington Examiner:

The 340B drug discount program grew to an eye-popping $100 billion in drug sales in 2025, making it the largest government program most people have never heard of.

Enacted under the Public Health Service Act to require drug manufacturers to provide outpatient drugs at steep discounts to safety-net hospitals serving low-income patients, 340B has metastasized into a massive revenue engine for big nonprofit hospital systems. They use it to pocket billions in discounts that are not passed on to patients, while billing employers and taxpayers the full price that they don’t have to pay. It’s become a massive scam, and one of the principal ways notionally “nonprofit” hospitals rack up massive tax-exempt profits.

Fortunately, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has this disaster in its sights for reform under the leadership of Dr. Mehmet Oz.

On July 2, 2026, CMS issued a new proposed payment rule that links payments from taxpayers and employers to what hospitals actually paid for drugs. This commonsense update, which aligns what Medicare pays hospitals to administer these drugs with what the drugs actually cost them, is estimated to save Medicare an eye-popping $4.55 billion and reduce patient out-of-pocket costs by $1.15 billion in just the first year.

Those calculations are CMS’s best estimates, but still likely underestimate the savings because many 340B-exploiting hospitals hide their data. When CMS asked hospitals to report what they actually pay for drugs, 340B institutions showed up far less than everyone else, complying at roughly half the rate of non-340B hospitals — just 28.6%.

Read more at the Washington Examiner.