The American Hospital Association (AHA) has sent a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative to ask that medications, medical devices and other healthcare equipment and supplies such as personal protective equipment (PPE) be exempted from proposed duties on goods from other nations.
In the letter, signed by Akinluwa Demehin, the AHA’s vice president of quality and safety policy, the AHA states that “such exceptions are important for most goods used in hospitals, and are especially critical for low-margin, high-volume goods (e.g., those that are difficult to produce sustainably using existing domestic capacity).”
The AHA states that U.S. hospitals and health systems “strongly support the administration’s goal of strengthening domestic manufacturing for drugs, medical devices, PPE and other essential medical supplies,” as well as “reducing trade practices that confer an unfair advantage to other nations” and “efforts to eliminate forced labor from their supply chains.
“At the same time, building domestic manufacturing capacity is a complex, years-long process entailing significant logistical complexity and resources for manufacturers, distributors and purchasers such as hospitals and health systems,” the AHA writes. “In the meantime, patients’ lives depend on the ready availability of medications, medical devices, equipment and supplies, PPE, and countless other products necessary to deliver safe and effective care. We are concerned that broad tariffs on these critical goods—and any retaliatory action from the countries on which tariffs are imposed—could inadvertently disrupt the availability of diagnostic and treatment tools essential to delivering high quality, safe and effective care.”
The AHA adds that it is concerned about “the potential for tariffs to raise the costs of delivering care in hospitals and health systems. A recent survey found that 82% of healthcare experts expect tariff-related expenses to increase hospital costs by at least 15%, and 90% of supply chain professionals expect procurement disruptions. Given that hospital payments are set by government and private payor contracts in advance and cannot be easily adjusted to account for expense increases, the costs would be borne by hospitals directly.”
Read the full letter, which contains ample data and tackles other aspects of the issue, here.
