Hospitals that skip price disclosure half the time profit off a poverty subsidy in wealthy suburbs.

…(cont) Nine days later the first readout on those steps arrived. The Patient Rights Advocate group's eighth report, out September 10, put hospital compliance with the federal price-transparency rule at a record high. The record high was 49.4 percent. Roughly half the industry posts its prices where a patient could find them before a bill arrives; roughly half does not. Calling that a record tells you what the previous seven reports found.

Lay the three filings end to end and the gap gets an address. The sector drawing margin off a poverty subsidy in zip codes that never needed one is the same sector running a coin-flip rate of compliance with the rule meant to let a patient see a price coming. None of the three filings draws a line connecting the two facts, and none rules it out. How many 340B dollars actually reached a patient who could not pay is a number none of September's or October's filings supply, which is its own kind of finding.

The program was named for the patient at the bottom. Run the receipts end to end and the money clears somewhere else: a hospital system with a coin-flip compliance rate and a $14 billion figure attached to its sector, sitting in a zip code that was never the ask. Congress wrote the eligibility rule. It did not write the audit. That is the gap, hon, and it does not close by itself.