Colorado’s legislature is considering two bills related to the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program and both bills are now advancing to the House after passing out of the Senate today.  

Colorado BioScience Association (CBSA) has been educating legislators about 340B and advocating on behalf of Colorado’s life sciences ecosystem and the patients we serve. If Colorado is going to consider establishing requirements related to 340B, it’s critical to start by demanding meaningful transparency and accountability (like in SB25-124) before even contemplating mandates (like in SB25-071) that would codify unchecked expansion of a program with little oversight or demonstrated benefit to patients. 

Thank you to everyone who reached out to the Senate after CBSA’s call to action on March 20. Your support is critical to amplifying CBSA’s ongoing advocacy and lobbying work and to ensuring legislators prioritize patient-centered policy. Our work will continue in the House. 

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The 340B program was originally intended to help low-income and uninsured patients access affordable medications by requiring drug manufacturers to provide discounts to safety-net providers. However, misuse and abuse of this well-intentioned but ballooning program is driving up costs for patients, taxpayers, employers, and everyone who pays for healthcare. 

It’s bad policy to create new state mandates that expand 340B before we even have full information about true costs and impacts of the program. Confusion has been sown about the 340B program, but multiple independent reports have shed light on the issue, including those from the Government Accountability Office, the State Treasurer of North Carolina, the Pacific Research Institute, and the New York Times. 

As these reports clearly demonstrate, some hospitals have turned the 340B program into a profit-making scheme—pocketing discounts instead of ensuring they benefit patients, inflating prices, and reducing charity care.  

Voting NO on SB25-071 and YES on SB25-124 will protect patients, taxpayers, and employers who pay for the rising costs of healthcare driven by the explosion of the 340B program, while charity care declines. 

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Testimony in Opposition to SB25-071

CBSA’s Vice President and Counsel for Policy + Advocacy Amy Goodman testified in opposition to SB25-071 in front of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee on March 13, 2025. Below is an excerpt from her testimony:

“CBSA champions Colorado’s life sciences ecosystem and the patients it serves. One of our top policy priorities is to protect patient access to health innovation by working to maximize broad, equitable, affordable, and timely patient access to needed therapies. To support this priority, CBSA works to ensure enacted policies achieve their intended goals and benefit patients while not resulting in unintended consequences for patients or the public.

There are extensive national discussions about how the 340B Drug Pricing Program, although well-intentioned, has major flaws that need reform at the federal level.

There is also mounting evidence that there are both good actors and bad actors who utilize the 340B program for very different purposes and the program is rife with abuse and misuse, which is significantly exacerbated by the exploding number of contract pharmacies used by many hospitals.

To be clear, Senate Bill 71 is not about patient access or affordability. Contracting with pharmacies does not expand patient access to medications and patients are not required to fill their prescriptions at contract pharmacies.

Contract pharmacy mandates are about allowing hospitals to capture profits from discounts on an ever-increasing percentage of prescriptions, even though that money comes from employers, commercial insurance plans, the state Medicaid program, or even directly from patients.

Reports from patient groups, policy experts, and states show that patients are not benefiting from 340B funds and hospitals are often not using those funds to even indirectly benefit the communities they serve.

However, the reporting requirements in this bill fall far short of providing meaningful transparency, and Amendment L.001 actually weakens those requirements.

It’s bad policy to create new state mandates that expand a program before having full information about true costs and impacts of the program.”

Testimony in Support of SB25-124

Amy Goodman also testified in support of SB25-124 in front of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee on March 13, 2025. Below is an excerpt from her testimony:

“[CBSA works] to advance state and federal policies that support Colorado’s life sciences innovators and the patients they serve.

We have many member companies that were founded or grown here, with large employee bases that live in the state. We have a long history of supporting healthcare reforms that benefit patients, such as expanding access to clinical trials and biomarker testing and addressing barriers to access. We work closely with patient advocates and organizations on priorities important to all of us.

We listen to patients about what actually benefits them, what policies don’t achieve their intended purpose, and what policies inadvertently harm them.

Since patients are the end users of the drugs and devices that our members research, develop, and manufacture, I’m here today to voice support for Senate Bill 124.

If Colorado is going to consider establishing requirements related to 340B, it’s critical to start by demanding meaningful transparency and accountability before even contemplating mandates that would codify unchecked expansion of a program with little oversight or demonstrated benefit to patients.

Similar to other 340B transparency measures around the country, this bill requires robust reporting that is critical to understanding more about where 340B funds are flowing, how they’re being used, and the program’s costs to employers, the state, and everyone else who pays for healthcare.

This bill also creates parameters for hospitals’ use of profits associated with the 340B program, an important check that will ensure the program is serving the patients it was intended to help.

I want to remind you that, most of the time, patients have no idea whether they’ve been seen at a 340B hospital, been prescribed a 340B drug, or gone to a contract pharmacy that’s funneling 340B profits back to a hospital. Patients continue to have no idea whether they’ve filled an eligible prescription at a contract pharmacy because they almost never—1.4% of the time—have a 340B discount passed onto them by a hospital’s contract pharmacy.

Since there is currently no guarantee that low-income patients benefit from this program, this bill would begin to ensure the 340B program is achieving its intended purpose so that qualifying, vulnerable patients would actually receive support at the point of sale.”