Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to impose tariffs of up to 100% on branded prescription drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients from abroad.
The administration insists these imports "threaten to impair the national security and economy" — and that the new policy is a "necessary and appropriate" means of addressing that threat.
The real danger, however, isn't a foreign-sourced drug supply. It's the new taxes that will make medicines more expensive and harder to access for American patients.
It's hard to imagine this policy coming along at a worse time for patients. Just last month, a Gallup poll found "the availability and affordability of healthcare" to be the top domestic concern among Americans — with 84% of people from across the political spectrum saying they were worried either "a great deal" or a "fair amount" about the issue.
A separate poll revealed that one-third of Americans — roughly 82 million — report having to make sacrifices like skipping meals, cutting back on utilities, and driving less in order to afford care.
Four in ten Americans did not take their medicines as prescribed last year because of cost concerns. By one estimate, such medication "non-adherence," as it is known, leads to 125,000 deaths each year as well as one-quarter of all hospitalizations.
The tariffs risk making this crisis significantly worse.
Defenders of the tariffs claim they're essential to reshoring pharmaceutical manufacturing to the United States and securing our nation's drug supply chain.
Those are worthy policy goals. But tariffs are a destructive instrument for trying to achieve them.
The president has promised to waive tariffs for companies that agree to "most-favored-nation" pricing agreements with the U.S. government, wherein they acquiesce to price controls for certain American payers, based on price caps in force in other developed countries.
The administration says it's reached 17 such deals with drug makers.
Other countries may be eligible for lower tariffs, if they have bilateral agreements of their own with the United States.
He has pledged to reduce the tariff to 20% for companies that have plans to onshore production of pharmaceuticals and related ingredients.
But the tariffs will jump back to 100% in 2030.
Even a 20% tax will send drug prices soaring in the short term.
Standing up a pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure in just four years will be incredibly difficult. Safety and quality standards are steep. And the United States is already facing a shortage of qualified workers.
Four in five pharmaceutical manufacturers say there's already a mismatch between available workforce skills and their operational requirements.
Manufacturers cannot snap their fingers to create a skilled workforce on demand.
Further, the drugs currently made in the United States depend in large part on foreign-sourced ingredients.
Just 15% of active pharmaceutical ingredients in the branded medications sold here are manufactured in America.
Tariffs on imported ingredients will raise production costs across the board — and make it more expensive, not less, for companies to invest in new U.S. manufacturing facilities.
Finally, these import taxes threaten to undermine the very part of the pharmaceutical sector where the United States leads the world — innovation.
America is the world's medicine chest; roughly two-thirds of new medicines introduced between 2011 and 2021 originated here.
That success is no accident.
It reflects decades of investment in research and development — work that is expensive, risky, and uniquely valuable.
Tariffs would divert resources away from that innovation.
Every dollar spent paying import taxes, or building redundant manufacturing capacity in high-cost environments, is a dollar not spent developing new treatments and cures.
That tradeoff matters.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing is important, but it is also relatively low-margin and globally competitive.
Many countries can produce drugs and ingredients at lower cost.
Far fewer can match the United States' capacity to discover and develop breakthrough therapies.
By trying to force more manufacturing onshore through tariffs, policymakers risk weakening the very innovation ecosystem that makes America indispensable to global health.
That's hardly putting America first.
Rather than strengthening America's healthcare system or supply chain, these tariffs risk making medicines less affordable, less accessible, and ultimately less secure.
They also could reduce research and development activity — and thus slow the introduction of new treatments that are so important to our longevity.
Those are results no administration should want.
Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Healthcare Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "The World's Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It." Follow her on X @sallypipes. Read more Sally Pipes Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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