Op-Ed: Time to stop this Obamacare payoff to big hospitals

Government programs often spiral out of control, harming the very people they were supposed to help. Obamacare was full of such perversities. The most obvious are skyrocketing prices caused by a law that claims to make care “affordable.” While fixing the structure requires action by Congress, the Trump administration has gone into the policy weeds with a machete to fix some of Obamacare’s lesser known, but still destructive, policies.

One of these is a drug program known as 340B. It’s not sexy, but it is big – the second largest drug purchasing program in the nation and growing so fast it will soon be the largest. It lets some hospitals and clinics buy certain prescription medicines at a big discount but sell them to patients at full price.

Ironically, 340B was created to fix an earlier government blunder. In 1990, Congress decided to force pharmaceutical companies to give discounts to hospitals treating Medicaid patients. But drug companies already voluntarily gave big discounts to many hospitals, which the new r...