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Improving health care for all Americans is a monumentally important and challenging task. Often, the finer policy details and decisions that can affect real, positive change within our health care system can get lost in the larger debate over how to most effectively improve access, increase quality and control costs. But these smaller policy reforms require our attention because they can greatly enhance our health care system overall.

Defenders of the federal 340B program, which requires drug companies to give discounts to eligible health care organizations, say it is vital as an economic lifeline for safety-net hospitals.

With all the recent talk about controlling skyrocketing drug prices, especially for those patients who cannot afford them, Congress should review the 340B program. Created in 1992, 340B was established to help vulnerable or uninsured patients afford their medications by providing discounted medicines to certain hospitals and specialty clinics.

On Wednesday, November 1, 2017, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a new rule that will lower costs to taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries for certain outpatient pharmaceuticals purchased under the 340B drug discount program.

Mark Twain once proclaimed, “The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.”