Following a federal judge's ruling that instructed HHS to immediately pay for 340B hospitals' drug costs, the agency will increase payment rates in two weeks after the HHS shrank reimbursements for years, according to the American Hospital Association.
In a brief filed Sept. 30, HHS said the reason for the timeline is because the process "requires revisions to four different electronic data files and then testing by multiple offices to confirm that the revised files function appropriately before the files are loaded to the production environment where they will be used to calculate OPPS reimbursements on a prospective basis."
In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of hospitals part of the 340B program — which allows eligible hospitals to buy discounted outpatient drugs — and said HHS couldn't vary the program's reimbursement, which it did in 2018 by lowering it by 28.5 percent and then later to 22.5 percent.
District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who decided the ruling, wrote that "HHS should not be allowed to continue its unlawful 340B reimbursements for the remainder of the year just because it promises to fix the problem later."