54 percent more likely to cause severe adverse health events<\/a>\u00a0than comparable drugs made in the United States or Europe. <\/p>\nSevere means hospitalization\u2014or worse. These are medicines people take every day, trusting they\u2019ll make them better, not harm them.<\/p>\n
Anyone who\u2019s toured a modern domestic pharmaceutical facility has seen the quality\u00a0difference between foreign-made and American-made medications\u00a0firsthand. American plants operate under strict standards, constant inspection, and a basic moral obligation: we\u2019re making medicine for our neighbors, our parents, and our kids. <\/p>\n
That same accountability does not exist overseas. FDA inspectors have documented animals in production areas, shredded quality records, and contaminated batch logs in foreign facilities supplying the U.S. market.<\/p>\n
Critics of American-made medicines argue that they\u2019re too expensive. The reality is we don\u2019t have a cost problem. We have a policy problem. The United States still has the capacity to make generic drugs at home. Some American facilities are operating at 50 percent utilization or less.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alabama is home to such facilities, like Oxford Pharmaceuticals located in Birmingham, Alabama. It produces a generic tablet for a little over one cent per pill. <\/p>\n
A bottle of 100 doses costs about $1.50 to make. Medicare reimburses that same bottle at more than $13. The money is there\u2014it\u2019s just being siphoned off by a supply chain that rewards middlemen and foreign producers instead of American workers and patients.<\/p>\n
We can quickly return to \u2018Made in America\u2019 when it comes to medicine\u00a0if we put the right incentives in place. First, we should use federal procurement to support domestic manufacturing. <\/p>\n
The federal government is one of the largest buyers of medicines in the world\u2014through Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and the Department of Defense. <\/p>\n
We should use that buying power to prioritize U.S.-made generics and provide long-term contracts that give manufacturers the confidence to invest and expand.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Second, we need targeted trade enforcement. Generic drugs are essential medicines. If we\u2019re serious about reshoring them, then trade policy\u2014including Section 232 actions\u2014has to address generics directly. <\/p>\n
There is no national security crisis in branded pharmaceuticals. The crisis is in generics, where foreign dependence has hollowed out domestic production and left us exposed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Third, we need transparency. Americans should be able to know where their medicines are made. Right now, it\u2019s often impossible to tell. That\u2019s nonsensical. <\/p>\n
If country-of-origin labeling matters for food, it should matter for medicine. No country should rely on its top adversaries for the medicines that keep its people alive.<\/p>\n
Americans deserve better than the status quo. We can\u2019t wait for another pandemic to hit to take this seriously. It isn\u2019t just a health crisis; it\u2019s an urgent national security concern as well. <\/p>\n
We haven\u2019t been preparing to win in America when it comes to our generic drug supply chain, and we are another disruption away from failure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Making medicine in America again isn\u2019t radical. It\u2019s common sense. And it\u2019s long overdue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[103,61,60,371,98889],"class_list":["post-282884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-medication","tag-tommy-tuberville"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}