Among the many, many things to love about how Donald Trump reshaped the Republican Party is that we are no longer the party of Big Business. Seems like a weird legacy for a billionaire, but here we are.
For decades, Republicans championed corporate America because it was the right thing to do. Cutting taxes and regulations in the 1980s spurred the wealth and technological innovation of the 1990s. But for everything we did for Big Business, the deeper we got into the 21st century, the less it seemed they wanted to return the favor.
GOP policy for the last 50 years has been to do what is good for the economy writ large, however Big Business seems to only want to do what is good for them. That isn’t to say we were wrong when we became the Reagan-era champions of corporate America. It’s that we no longer need to help an institution that abandoned us for DEI, LGBT marketing to children, Imperial China, etcetera.
When corporate America ditched the “America” part, they ditched us.
And nowhere has this betrayal been worse than with Big Pharma. We have defended Big Pharma from, say, the Democrats’ threat of price controls … and its way of saying “thank you” is to chemically mutilate children, push medication abortions, and sabotage the economy because “pandemic.”
Now, they’re taking aim at a program that requires them to give discounts to mostly Republican populations.
Big Pharma is on a rampage against the 340B program, both in the courts and the court of public opinion. Created in 1992 by former Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to cut outpatient medical costs, the 340B program requires that drug manufacturers give discounts to prescriptions given at covered entities: hospitals and clinics that serve a significant amount of Medicaid patients. If the medical facility wants to get those Medicaid dollars, it has to offer these discounts.
A successful institution from when the federal government worked really well — the 1990s — 340B is a model for how Uncle Sam can leverage free-market outcomes. Those who benefit the most from 340B are lower-income, rural populations, that is to say, working-class Democrats abandoned by the Obama administration who became America First Republicans: the people Vice President Vance wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy.
But although 340B really helps those Hillbillies, Big Pharma wants them to turn on that very program. Big Pharma’s shenanigans include trying to trick Trump voters into thinking the program is being exploited by illegal immigrants and for “gender-affirming” care performed on minors. Now Big Pharma is happy to make bank off of the manufacture of abortion medication, take advantage of illegal immigrants for their blood and vulnerable, brainwashed “trans” children – raking in the big bucks, and handsomely, in the latter case from the only civil rights movement in the entirety of human history to have a profit motive. They’re hoping we all forget that in their full-court press against the successful 30-year-old program and blame anybody but them.
And why wouldn’t pharmaceutical giants want to get rid of 340B? It costs them (and saves us) a lot of money. In 2024 alone, according to a report, 340B saved beneficiaries $98 billion in medical costs! And that number is only going to increase year over year.
The same report predicts that one in four drugs will be purchased at the reduced 340B price this year, and the program could be the largest federal drug program by 2028. By then, the average discount for that price will be more than 60%! This is all conjecture, of course, based on trends of the program’s 169% growth since 2020. They’ll lie and manipulate the narrative to try and con conservatives into turning on the 340B program and take the side of Big Pharma, and they’ll spare no expense to do it.
Again, Big Pharma doesn’t like that they’ve had to pay out so much since the “pandemic” lockdowns, but given how many COVID billionaires those lockdowns created, let’s just say they owe us.
And that should be the key phrase going forward whenever there’s whining from Big Pharma, Wall Street, or the military-industrial complex. They owe us. Republicans spent years helping them in, and our reward is getting stabbed in the back, the front, and everywhere else. No wonder one of their biggest friends in Congress right now is Bernie Sanders.
Jared Whitley has worked in the U.S. Senate, the White House, and the defense industry. He worked for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who was the author of the 340B program. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. In 2024 he won the Top of the Rockies best columnist award.
