EAGLE MOUNTAIN, UT \u2014 President Trump says by 2028 generic drugs could face a 100% tariff and a 200% tariff by 2029 in an attempt for drug manufacturers to move their production to the United States.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not just patients with debilitating illnesses that will be hit; it\u2019s everyone.<\/p>\n
Fox 13 met Penny Hepworth more than two years ago when she was in fifth grade.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s now an eighth grader.<\/p>\n
The spunky cheerleader isn\u2019t like most kids her age.<\/p>\n
She has cystic fibrosis, a condition that causes damage to the lungs from mucus build-up.<\/p>\n
When we met all those years ago, Penny had just finished one of her many stints in the hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cPenny we say is generally doing really well. She has been diagnosed with some new conditions, including chronic pancreatitis, which is due to the cystic fibrosis, so she\u2019s had a couple of hospitalizations due to that,\u201d says Penny’s mother Jen.<\/p>\n
Along with hospitalizations and treatments, there\u2019s her medication.<\/p>\n
The price tag – staggering.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we didn\u2019t have insurance, we would be spending about $50,000 a month on her medication,” says Jen. “That drug is over $300,000 a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Hepworths spend at least $25,000 on healthcare just between their premiums.<\/p>\n
Because they know they\u2019ll hit their out-of-pocket max every year, they always put aside that $25,000.<\/p>\n
The thought of a 100% tariff on imported drugs on an already strained healthcare budget is not welcome news.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you imagine a 100% tariff on a $300,000 drug? How am I supposed to provide that when inevitably the insurance finds a way to drop it because of the massive price tag? How am I supposed to afford a now $600,000 drug that\u2019s literally changed my daughter\u2018s life and keeping her alive?\u201d says Jen.<\/p>\n
Salt Lake pharmacist Kevin DeMass says that it\u2019s not just medications for chronic illnesses that will be hit if those tariffs do happen; it\u2019s everything you find in any medicine cabinet.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not only the drug that\u2019s affected by the tariffs.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the packaging, the coloring, the vehicle, it\u2019s everything that makes the final product.<\/p>\n
He explains why only two years to develop our own drug manufacturing here in the United States is tricky.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are the president of a huge drug company and you were looking at billions of dollars of investment in brick and mortar, rebar, lighting, shipping, concrete, everything to build this and somebody who comes into office and says no, I don\u2019t like the tariff thing\u2026I\u2019m going to get a pen and I\u2019m going to sign, no tariffs, goodbye. Now my stockholders have just spent billions and billions of dollars and I\u2019ve got a building without a roof on it in North carolina. They are very unhappy with me and the investment that I made,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The drug market is truly global and DeMass says everyone\u2019s reliance on the other means it\u2019s not easy to cut out the middlemen.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy pharmaceutical company or your pharmaceutical company only makes “this” and you need other companies for the lid, for the labeling, for the bottle. You\u2019re just making the solution, so you\u2019d have to partner with seven other companies and say, ‘Could you spend billions and billions and billions of dollars to come over so that I could sell this liquid in the U.S. because we need the whole piece?’ Because they don\u2019t want to have to invest in doing everything else and that\u2019s hard,” says DeMass. “They\u2019re going to start to ration, where the life-saving drugs go to the players and if the U.S. market is smaller than what their threshold will be, this drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. This drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. This HIV drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. So now we no longer have those tools to treat our patients.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Jen and family, without the tariffs there\u2019s still a battle to fight \u2013 the one to stay alive.<\/p>\n
But she hopes that something will change before 2028.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile I understand the motivation to get more manufacturing in America, you are killing people in America,” says Jen. “She was three weeks old and I\u2019m holding her at Primary Children\u2019s Hospital and being told that her life expectancy is 38. I just turned 39 and I don\u2019t feel like my life is done and I wouldn\u2019t want hers to be done at this time either.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EAGLE MOUNTAIN, UT \u2014 President Trump says by 2028 generic drugs could face a 100% tariff and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":908738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[64,63,137,490],"class_list":["post-908737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-medication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}