This week, multiple associations and hospital groups refiled a lawsuit to reverse changes made to the 340B program.

We’ve written about 340B before, it’s a program that was instituted with the best of intentions, to provide discount prescription medications to the poorest Americans, but has become a honeypot for hospitals to simply collect taxpayer dollars with no accountability to the program’s mission.

In fact, the GAO determined that the program “does not have a reasonable assurance that covered entities have adequately identified and addressed noncompliance,” pointing out the systemic flaw in the $16 billion program.

Hospitals already challenged the changes made to the program, which reigned in spending and instituted new clarifications for the program and its reporting structures to institute greater accountability.

It’s small wonder, then, that they would like to keep the system as it is. However, hospitals should be held accountable, not only to the 340B program, the many ways in which they increase the cost of healthcare for all patients.

Just last week we wrote about how hospitals are able to dramatically increase the cost of care for patients, as very often patients have no other alternative to seek care.

Each week a new study comes out showing how hospitals and hospital systems routinely raise their prices on consumers with no correlation to either an increase in the cost of a procedure or the quality of care received. They’re raising prices because they can.

For example, in California, a study found that from 2002 to 2016 billed charges from hospitals rose from $263 billion to $386 billion while there was no associated increase in patients. In this instance, hospitals raised prices by over $100 billion on the same number of patients, an astronomical increase.

Similarly, a new study found that 83 percent of hospitals charged patients and insurers twice as much as a medication was cost. Even more egregious, 17 percent of hospitals charged seven times as much as what the hospital paid for a medication – an increase of 700 percent.

This is unchecked abuse and patients end up suffering, either through high out-of-pocket expenses, larger premiums to compensate for higher overall costs, or potentially crippling medical debt.

Hospitals certainly have a right to file this lawsuit (again), but consumers should be aware that this isn’t a well-intentioned action to try and provide discounts to more patients, but just another way in which hospitals are gaming the system.

In this, the Trump Administration was right to institute new reforms for 340B, now we’d like them to help bring greater accountability and transparency to hospitals and their pricing to help patients ensure they aren’t stuck with exorbitant bills that have no correlation to their care.