Issue #19: The 340B Spread
How hospitals buy drugs at steep federal discounts, bill insurers at full price, and keep $10.3 billion per year more than they deliver in documented charity care
How hospitals buy drugs at steep federal discounts, bill insurers at full price, and keep $10.3 billion per year more than they deliver in documented charity care
How hospital documentation programs shift Medicare discharges into higher-paying severity tiers, and the 1 billion dollars per year a faster recalibration cycle could recover
How Medicare Part B pays 1.8 times the international price for physician-administered biologics, generating $6.2 billion per year in recoverable savings
Medicare negotiated 25 drugs. The next 100 brand products carry the same international price gap, and roughly $16 billion a year in recoverable savings.
How hospital-owned clinics bill Medicare two to four times the office rate for the same procedure, and the $2.55 billion a year a site-neutral fix would recover
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How a 30-year-old payment cascade overpays procedural specialty work relative to primary care and international peers, generating $28 billion per year in recoverable excess
How $46 billion in annual tax exemptions flows to nonprofit hospitals that deliver less charity care per dollar than the for-profit chains paying full taxes
How hospital mergers raise commercial prices and pass $13 billion per year into employer premiums
How Medicare Advantage gets paid more for the same patient
How fee-for-service payment generates $7.6 billion per year in low-value Medicare and all-payer spending, and why New York pays 6.7x what Vermont does for the same evidence-poor procedures
How 32 years of premium growth moved $125,340 in wages through ERISA plans into the hospital-PBM-insurer stack, and what Form 5500 finally lets us measure
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How insurers use prior authorization denials to extract $24 billion per year from Medicare Advantage patients
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The fastest-growing drug class in history costs 3-5x more in America. We modeled what happens when Medicare starts paying.
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Original analysis of 5,480 hospitals reveals $28 billion in addressable supply waste
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How $200 billion a year in billing complexity and administrative overhead inflates U.S. healthcare costs
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How Pharmacy Benefit Managers extract $30 billion a year from the drug supply chain, and what to do about it
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Why a hip replacement costs $29,000 in America and $10,000 almost everywhere else
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Why nine top-spend Medicare drugs cost up to 581x more in America than abroad
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How Medicare Part D overpays for brand drugs with cheaper over-the-counter equivalents