Last week in Forbes, Big Pharma propagandist Sally Pipes claimed that 340B enables corruption, by letting hospitals “enhance their bottom lines with hundreds of millions of dollars intended to help the indigent.”
Someone forgot to tell this to Wall Street.
Around the same time that Pipes was fulminating about those devious 340B hospitals, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services warned in two reports that nonprofit hospitals and health systems barely broke even in 2013 and face even harder times this year. Nonprofits are the bulk of hospitals enrolled in 340B and they are the targets of a relentless Big Pharma smear campaign.
As reported by the Drug Discount Monitor Aug. 18, Standard & Poor’s said in a third report that, “If anything is clear, it’s that pharmaceutical prices will continue to rise, with high-end specialty drugs causing growing headaches.”
The median operating margin for nonprofit health systems fell to 2.2 percent in 2013—the lowest it has been since the financial crisis of 2008—and it is expected to decline even further in 2014, S&P said.
And what’s the current average profit margin for major drug manufacturers? According to Yahoo! Finance, it’s 20.8 percent.
“We believe the sector is at a tipping point where negative forces have started to outweigh many providers’ ability to implement sufficient countermeasures,” said S&P credit analyst Margaret McNamara.