A Republican Indiana state senator filed a bill that would disrupt the state’s 340B Drug Discount program, which supports regional hospitals and threatens to add momentum to Big Pharma’s national effort to suppress 340B in other states.
Indiana is a conservative state, but the fight over the bill highlights the difference between the academic conservatism of Ronald Reagan and the practical conservatism of Donald Trump.
Seen through the Reaganism lens, any government program that distorts market efficiency is a bad program, regardless of its goals or outcomes, because the market is always correct.
Trump liberated conservatism from the textbooks, and he made it OK to consider that the real-life consequences of a policy decision are for actual — not theoretical — people.
Congress created the 340B program as part of the 1992 Veterans Health Care Act as a very simple idea….
