EAGLE MOUNTAIN, UT — President Trump says by 2028 generic drugs could face a 100% tariff and a 200% tariff by 2029 in an attempt for drug manufacturers to move their production to the United States.
But it’s not just patients with debilitating illnesses that will be hit; it’s everyone.
Fox 13 met Penny Hepworth more than two years ago when she was in fifth grade.
She’s now an eighth grader.
The spunky cheerleader isn’t like most kids her age.
She has cystic fibrosis, a condition that causes damage to the lungs from mucus build-up.
When we met all those years ago, Penny had just finished one of her many stints in the hospital.
“Penny we say is generally doing really well. She has been diagnosed with some new conditions, including chronic pancreatitis, which is due to the cystic fibrosis, so she’s had a couple of hospitalizations due to that,” says Penny's mother Jen.
Along with hospitalizations and treatments, there’s her medication.
The price tag - staggering.
“If we didn’t have insurance, we would be spending about $50,000 a month on her medication," says Jen. "That drug is over $300,000 a year.”
The Hepworths spend at least $25,000 on healthcare just between their premiums.
Because they know they’ll hit their out-of-pocket max every year, they always put aside that $25,000.
The thought of a 100% tariff on imported drugs on an already strained healthcare budget is not welcome news.
“Can you imagine a 100% tariff on a $300,000 drug? How am I supposed to provide that when inevitably the insurance finds a way to drop it because of the massive price tag? How am I supposed to afford a now $600,000 drug that’s literally changed my daughter‘s life and keeping her alive?” says Jen.
Salt Lake pharmacist Kevin DeMass says that it’s not just medications for chronic illnesses that will be hit if those tariffs do happen; it’s everything you find in any medicine cabinet.
And it’s not only the drug that’s affected by the tariffs.
It’s the packaging, the coloring, the vehicle, it’s everything that makes the final product.
He explains why only two years to develop our own drug manufacturing here in the United States is tricky.
“If you are the president of a huge drug company and you were looking at billions of dollars of investment in brick and mortar, rebar, lighting, shipping, concrete, everything to build this and somebody who comes into office and says no, I don’t like the tariff thing…I’m going to get a pen and I’m going to sign, no tariffs, goodbye. Now my stockholders have just spent billions and billions of dollars and I’ve got a building without a roof on it in North carolina. They are very unhappy with me and the investment that I made,” he says.
The drug market is truly global and DeMass says everyone’s reliance on the other means it’s not easy to cut out the middlemen.
“My pharmaceutical company or your pharmaceutical company only makes "this" and you need other companies for the lid, for the labeling, for the bottle. You’re just making the solution, so you’d have to partner with seven other companies and say, 'Could you spend billions and billions and billions of dollars to come over so that I could sell this liquid in the U.S. because we need the whole piece?' Because they don’t want to have to invest in doing everything else and that’s hard," says DeMass. "They’re going to start to ration, where the life-saving drugs go to the players and if the U.S. market is smaller than what their threshold will be, this drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. This drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. This HIV drug gets eliminated from the U.S. market. So now we no longer have those tools to treat our patients.”
For Jen and family, without the tariffs there’s still a battle to fight – the one to stay alive.
But she hopes that something will change before 2028.
“While I understand the motivation to get more manufacturing in America, you are killing people in America," says Jen. "She was three weeks old and I’m holding her at Primary Children’s Hospital and being told that her life expectancy is 38. I just turned 39 and I don’t feel like my life is done and I wouldn’t want hers to be done at this time either.”