There's a good chance you or someone you know has been directly impacted by the recent spate of drug shortages affecting Americans right now. People of all ages are currently grappling with the inability to access A.D.H.D. medications that help them get through the day, common antibiotics that eliminate age-old infections like syphilis and chemotherapy drugs that can mean the difference between life and death. The sad truth is that while these specific shortages are new, drug shortages have been commonplace for about two decades now. The average shortage lasts 1.5 years before it's resolved. Few people have been studying this increasingly worsening issue as closely as Dr. Emily Tucker, an industrial engineer at Clemson University. In a recent guest essay for Opinion, Tucker traces the problem back squarely to the drug industry's weak supply chains. In an effort to offer lower prices than those of competitors, generic drug manufacturers have cut corners in ways that leave their production infrastructure weak and susceptible to crashing because of any number of problems, such as a natural disaster hitting a production area or a breakdown in equipment. When a shortage is on the horizon, panic buying by health care providers worsens the problem. The Food and Drug Administration is limited in what it can do to intervene. In my conversations with her as she worked on her essay, Tucker repeatedly emphasized how absurd it was that we've allowed the U.S. health care system to operate this way for so long. Though the solutions to fixing drug shortages are not by any means cheap or easy, they also aren't very complicated. Tucker outlines three major steps the federal government can take to salvage drug manufacturing from escalating disrepair. Her solutions don't require any creative new strategy or newfangled innovation — they simply require a political will to make them happen. "We have accepted the cheap deal of unreliable essential drug supply chains for too long, leaving patients in the lurch when shortages strike," she writes. Both parties in Congress, as well as the White House, have voiced their desire to fix the problem. At a Senate hearing last week on drug shortages, several experts made loud pleas for new solutions. But it's not yet clear whether legislation is coming through anytime soon. In the meantime, millions of Americans are left to their own devices to figure out how to move forward.
Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Opinion Today: Why all the drug shortages? It’s not a mystery.
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