Politics/Religion Consolidated Megathread Extravaganza

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Kansas lawmakers are debating whether to expand health care providers' access to the federal 340B drug pricing program. If passed, Senate Bill 284 would hand even more power to large hospital chains while shrinking consumer choice. It would also deepen the program's existing problems — lack of accountability, rising costs, and market consolidation — all without helping the patients it was supposed to serve.

The 340B program, created in 1992, was meant to help safety-net providers serving uninsured and low-income patients by requiring drug manufacturers to sell medications at steep discounts. Today, it has ballooned into the second-largest prescription drug purchasing program in the United States, behind only Medicare Part D, costing $66.3 billion in 2023.

SB 284 would make that worse. The bill would block drugmakers from denying access to certain drugs, reduce transparency, and discourage innovation. It would do nothing to stop hospitals from exploiting the program. Instead, it would encourage them to expand the same practices that drive up costs for Kansans, small businesses, and rural health care providers.

The 340B shell game
The myth behind 340B is that big health systems use their windfalls to support rural hospitals. The reality is the opposite. As 340B has expanded, rural hospitals have closed by the dozens. The law's original purpose — to subsidize drug purchases for clinics that serve the needy — has been lost.

[DKG]

Failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) founded a pair of voter turnout groups over a decade ago with the apparent aim of registering largely Democrat-leaning, non-white voters across the Peach State.

The groups, the New Georgia Project — for which Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock was listed as CEO on corporate filings in 2017, 2018, and 2019 — and the associated New Georgia Project Action Fund, reportedly knocked on millions of doors, registered tens of thousands of voters, and were credited with helping turn Georgia blue during the 2020 presidential election.

Abrams' New Georgia groups, which turned out to be as corrupt as they were energetic, have finally been shuttered.

NGP and NGP Action Fund — which sought to help Abrams in her pursuit of power, sided with alleged domestic terrorists in 2023, and campaigned against election integrity initiatives — were slapped in January with a $300,000 fine, which the Georgia State Ethics Commission indicated was both the largest fine it has ever imposed and possibly also "the largest Ethics Fine ever imposed by any State Ethics Commission in the country related to an election and campaign finance case."

The groups, which Abrams supposedly walked away from in 2017, admitted to violating 16 state laws, largely by illegally contributing to Abrams' 2018 gubernatorial campaign while masquerading as a nonpartisan voter turnout group.

The ethics commission found that the NGP failed to disclose over $4.2 million in contributions and over $3.2 million in expenditures during the 2018 election cycle, prompting House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) to request that the Internal Revenue Service investigate and ultimately revoke the group's tax-exempt status.

"This represents the largest and most significant instance of an organization illegally influencing our statewide elections in Georgia that we have ever discovered," the ethics commission noted at the time of the fine's imposition.

With the ruse both exposed and admitted, Abrams' groups were evidently not long for this world.

The board of directors for the NGP and NGP Action Fund indicated in a statement on Thursday that both scandal-plagued groups "will officially dissolve as organizations."