New U.S. import taxes now in pill form.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. President Trump has been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals for months.

This week, he was on TV saying he's planning what he called a small tariff at first on imported prescription drugs,

then raising it to maybe 250 percent over the next year or so.

Marketplaces Samantha Fields reports on what this emerging and possibly evolving plan could mean for patients who take the medicine.

90% of prescriptions filled in the U.S. every year are generics.

John Murphy at the Association for Accessible Medicines

says that includes most pills you'd get at the pharmacy, like blood pressure drugs and statins.

We manufacture about 45% of the pill needs for patients in the United States, and the rest of that

is, of course, imported. From India, Europe, and China. So it's a pretty global supply chain.

That's also true for injectable medications you might get at the hospital, like IV fluids and many

cancer drugs. Marta Voshenka at Brookings says it's a different story with more expensive brand name

drugs. The manufacturers that make branded products tend to have facilities on both sides of the

pond. And she says it would be easier for those companies to move more production to the U.S. if

necessary than it would be for makers of cheaper generics. Mariana SoCal at the Johns Hopkins

School of Public Health says it would also be easier for makers of brand-name drugs to absorb tariffs.

But for generic drugs, you know, they are not patented, very cheap drugs. The markup for the

drug manufacturers not that high. And manufacturers are already squeezed in their profits for

these drugs. So with tariffs, Marta Voschinska at Brookings says they could start losing money.

The cost that I worry about is not that prices for generics might increase,

is that manufacturers just might throw their hands up and say, you know, I don't want to sell in the U.S. market.

And that drug shortages could become more common.

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