America Turns 250. Here Are the 251 Members of Congress Who Stood Up for Its Healthcare Safety Net.

This year, America celebrates 250 years of independence.

So we went looking for something worth celebrating in Washington. We found 251 of them.

Two hundred fifty-one members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, have stood up in recent years for the 340B drug discount program. They signed the letters. They sponsored the bills. They told Big Pharma no. And they did it for the parts of this country that carry America on their backs.

Think about where 340B does its work.

It works in the rural county where the nearest hospital is the only one for 50 miles. It works in the farm towns that grow the food on your table and the big cities that power our economy. It works in the communities where putting on the uniform is still the highest honor a young person can imagine. It works in the small cities and the forgotten corners where a safety-net clinic is the difference between getting care and going without.

This is the heart of America. And 340B helps keep it beating.

Here is the part Big Pharma never wants you to hear.

The 340B program does not cost taxpayers a single penny.

Not one.

The discounts are paid by the drug manufacturers, not by you. It is the deal they accepted to sell their products to taxpayer-funded programs in the first place. Hospitals and clinics turn those savings into more cancer treatment, more insulin, more open clinic hours, more nurses in towns that cannot recruit them. No new spending. No new bureaucracy. Just more care for the people who need it most.

So why does Big Pharma spend millions trying to kill it?

Because it works. Because every dollar a rural hospital saves is a dollar that did not land in a drug company’s quarterly earnings. So they have tried rebate schemes. They have tried to choke off contract pharmacies. They have demanded your private health records as the price of a discount the law already requires them to give. They have run dark-money ads dressed up as concern for the very patients they are trying to cut off.

All this from an industry that charges Americans 4.2 times more for brand-name drugs than to patients in other developed countries — which doesn’t strike us as being very patriotic.

Through all of it, 251 members of Congress refused to look away.

They come from red states and blue states, coastal cities and farm country. They sit on opposite sides of almost everything else in this town. Reps. Doris Matsui and Debbie Dingell on one side of the aisle, Dusty Johnson and Tracey Mann on the other. A bipartisan bloc of senators from Wisconsin to West Virginia to Arkansas. On most days they agree on nothing. On this, they agreed: you do not balance Big Pharma’s books on the backs of rural hospitals and the patients who depend on them.

That kind of agreement is rare in Washington. It is worth stopping to honor.

So to all 251: thank you. From every rural hospital still standing. From every community health center keeping the lights on. From every veteran, every farmer, every working family who got their medicine because you held the line.

Two hundred fifty years ago, a handful of Americans decided that ordinary people were worth fighting for. This Fourth of July, 251 members of Congress proved that idea is still alive.

Happy birthday, America.

Your heartland has friends, and this year they earned the fireworks.

340B SUPPORTERS IN CONGRESS