Healthcare > Medicine

The Next Baby Formula Crisis: Medicine Tariffs

America has a habit of learning the wrong lesson from the right crisis.

Julio Rivera | April 25, 2026

America has a habit of learning the wrong lesson from the right crisis.

In 2022, American parents drove across state lines, refreshed store apps at 2 a.m., and paid absurd markups just to find baby formula. The shelves did not go empty because demand suddenly spiked. They went empty because the system was brittle, overconcentrated, and completely unprepared for a single failure. That episode should have been a warning about what happens when a critical supply chain is narrowed down to a handful of protected players. Instead, Washington now seems ready to recreate that same structure in a far more consequential arena: medicine.

The Trump administration’s push to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, including plans for aggressive action on branded drugs, has already begun to reshape the conversation. What should concern policymakers even more is the growing appetite to extend similar restrictions to generic drugs, which represent 90% of prescriptions in the United States.

Senator Rick Scott, for example, has leaned into the idea of tightening the system in the name of national security. The tariffs on generics may be delayed for now, but the next steps of this agenda are clear.

Because if those policies move forward without meaningful safeguards, the United States will not be securing its drug supply. It will be concentrating it. And concentration is........

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