Rep. La Shawn K. Ford: Stop letting Chicago’s hospital aid flow to wealthy suburbs

By La Shawn K. Ford
Chicago Tribune
October 24, 2025

Representing Chicago’s West Side in the Illinois House of Representatives, I’ve seen firsthand how access to health care can be incredibly fragile for low-income families.

Many of my constituents live in communities where hospitals have closed, clinics are underfunded and patients are forced to travel miles just to see a doctor.

That’s exactly why Congress created the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program in 1992. The idea was to give hospitals that serve large numbers of low-income patients drugs at significant discounts, often 25% to 50% below market price, while still getting each drugs’ full reimbursement rate from insurance. They were supposed to invest the difference in price into free clinics, charity care and community health programs in the underserved areas they serve.

Unfortunately, hospitals in Illinois are seriously abusing the 340B program. Some of our largest and wealthiest hospital systems are reaping millions of dollars from marking up discounted drugs meant for our underserved patients and funneling those profits into high-end suburban facilities, where they charge wealthy, fully insured patients full price and pocket the profit. This intentional exploitation of the program leaves the very communities the program was designed to help even further behind.

And yet, today, despite this far-from-stellar track record, hospital lobbyists have the audacity to be pressuring lawmakers in Springfield to expand 340B and are even asking them to remove transparency safeguards on the program. They paint this effort as a fight for patients. But to truly fight for patients, we must take an honest look at how the system is being abused today. Illinois hospitals are siphoning dollars away from poor communities to build cancer clinics and infusion centers in some of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the state.

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