President Trump recently announced that his administration will soon impose a "major tariff" on pharmaceutical imports, in response to various trade barriers that other countries place on American goods and services.
The president's push for fair trade is justifiable. But exempting medicines from tariffs is the only way to fulfill his promise to lower Americans' healthcare costs.
Many of the medicines that American patients rely upon are manufactured with Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and other components sourced from Europe. And for a variety of logistical, scientific, and regulatory reasons, medical supply chains are extremely complex.
As a result, imposing tariffs on European medical imports would almost immediately raise drug prices for American patients -- since it'd take years to readjust supply chains. And since America is a biotech powerhouse and top exporter of pharmaceutical products, these tariffs could cause ripple effects across the global supply chain and impact patient access around the world.
In the meantime, U.S. patients would have no way to avoid the tax. Medicines aren't luxury goods or consumer electronics. If a patient needs a particular cancer therapy, she needs that specific treatment. Her doctor prescribed it for a reason. She can't simply switch to a different prescription that relies on fewer European components, the way a grocery shopper might switch between foreign and domestic produce, or the way an auto manufacturer could source parts from domestic rather than foreign suppliers.
Domestic pharmaceutical companies already manufacture many lifesaving drugs. Nearly 360,000 Americans work at almost 1,600 biotech manufacturing plants nationwide. Those plants make roughly half of all the brand-name medicines that American patients take.
However, these plants rely on a mix of U.S.-made and foreign-made ingredients to churn out those finished products. More than half of the APIs -- the core chemical components responsible for a drug's therapeutic effect -- in U.S.-consumed medicines are produced in America. But roughly 32% of these APIs originate in Europe.
Tariffs on such essential components, as well as finished medicines imported from Europe, would drive up production costs and upend supply chains, simultaneously threatening workers' jobs and disrupting patients' access to medicines.
The resulting disruptions would particularly undermine the impressive progress that scientists have made against cancer. The U.S. cancer death rate has dropped by 33% since 1991 thanks to better medicines, which have helped save nearly four million lives. Cutting-edge treatments like CAR-T cell therapy and targeted immunotherapies have transformed survival rates for previously untreatable cancers.
And the future looks bright. Over 1,600 oncology medicines are currently in development in the United States, and about 80% have the potential to be first-in-class therapies -- representing entirely new approaches to fighting cancer. Other U.S. research efforts have led to breakthrough treatments for heart disease and G.I. disorders.
But higher prices and supply disruptions caused by tariffs would stall this critical research, delay vital approvals, and place innovative treatments beyond the reach of patients who desperately need them.
With more than two million new cancer cases anticipated in the United States this year -- a historic high -- now is the worst possible moment to undermine progress.
Medicines have historically been exempt from tariffs, and patients should never be collateral damage in a trade war. President Trump can show he's committed to lowering healthcare costs by keeping life-saving medicines out of the crossfire.
Andrew Spiegel is Board Chair of the World Patients Alliance.
