The 340B Drug Discount Program is rife with abuse, with cases of criminal fraudsters looting the program of millions of dollars. Haitian national Jean Jethro Alexandre was sentenced to prison time and ordered to pay $14.3 million in restitution for running two clinics as fraudulent prescription mills.
Haitian national Jean Jethro Alexandre was sentenced to prison time and ordered to pay $14.3 million in restitution for running two clinics as fraudulent prescription mills.
The clinics treated patients for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases on paper, but in reality, they existed to harvest the deep discounts that the 340B Drug Discount Program confers on HIV medications. The 340B Program was built to make treatment affordable for lower-income patients by allowing clinics to buy medicines cheaply, but it is rife with abuse. Federal prosecutors in Florida described in granular detail how criminal fraudsters can loot the 340B Program of millions of dollars.
Alexandre's clinics allegedly paid kickbacks to recruiters and to 'patients' willing to request prescriptions, falsified dispensing records, and disposed of the medications. Prosecutors put the fraud at roughly $58 million in false claims. The White House Fraud Task Force, chaired by Vice President JD Vance and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, was created to pursue cases like this.
The task force has already shown it can move money and attention quickly across agencies and should treat these Florida clinics not as a one-off, but as a model that almost certainly exists elsewhere. There is good reason to assume this type of scheme is widespread, given the large and lightly policed subsidies offered by the 340B Program.
The Department of Health and Human Services is aware of the risk and has run a pilot program to reform the rebate system and ensure integrity of the payments, but it has not yet been fully implemented. Alexandre's scheme is not exotic or hard to execute and the Vance-Ferguson task force should take this playbook and ensure that this prosecution is not a one-off, but rather the first of many
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