Senator Marshall: America Must Stand Up to China’s Drug Trap

Senator Marshall Joins Real America’s Voice to Discuss Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Issues

Washington – This week, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), joined John Solomon and Amanda Head on Real America’s Voice to discuss pharmaceutical supply chain issues and how the One Big, Beautiful Bill incentivizes American drug manufacturing.

Click HERE or on the image above to watch Senator Marshall’s full interview.

On U.S. reliance on China for pharmaceuticals:

“No, this is the horrible situation. America makes only about 10% of our active pharmaceutical ingredients. These are the simple things think about, you know, antibiotics, penicillin, ampicillin, Keflex. Think, think about insulin or monoclonal antibodies. These are real simple things, and I think it’s important that your listeners understand how this came to be. What China does is they steal our technology, then they replicate it, they bring it up to scale. Then after they’re up to scale, what they’ll do is they’ll enter the market with a product and undercut all their competition, and after they corner the market, they create an artificial shortage of that particular drug, and then they raise their prices. That’s their model. I saw this as a physician long before I came to Congress. I was doing an infertility surgery, and I asked the nurses, I needed some methylene blue to make sure someone’s fallopian tubes were open, and they said, Oh, Doc, we ran out of it. I said, Well, how come? And they said, well, it’s made in China, and that’s the only place we can get it from now. So, these are just a few examples of what we see going on.”

On China’s lower drug standards:

“Yeah, I do think it’s number one, is we did turn our back away from it. And when they’re the economics of it, you know, why can China make this cheaper than the United States? And let’s think about that for a second. They steal the technology, so they didn’t pay for the research and development. They have cheap labor. They use dirty energy. And here’s the big scary thing, though, is the standards. They don’t have the same consistency, the same standards that you and I would expect in the situation; they also use knockoff drugs. Really concerned about the compounding pharmacy industry right now that China is sending over a knockoff compound close to the other GLP one competitors, but it’s not exactly the same thing. At least 14 people have died in the past year taking this knockoff drug. So, I think that, on the one hand, we turned our back to it, but they really are able to do it cheaper. But like, I tell people, the last thing you want is cheap healthcare, cheap medications.”

On solutions to foreign-made pharmaceuticals:

“Well, I’m not sure that there is an easy one. I wouldn’t wager, though. The big cost of the drug that the retail price we’re paying is not how much it costs to make it, but there’s something between the manufacturer and the buyer, and that’s called a pharmacy benefit manager. So, if we could address that issue, it’s going to mean the cost of drugs [goes] down, but keep the same quality. And remember, when we’re talking about the quality of the drug that we’re using, or the medication, it’s not just the drug itself; it’s all the impurities. It’s what comes with it that really concerns me, and the inconsistencies. You know, when you expect to have 325 milligrams of acetaminophen in Tylenol, that’s what you’re expecting to have. And maybe it’s got 390 maybe it’s got 290.

“When it comes to kids, it’s even more of a concern to me. You know, I thought, forgive me, but I thought it’d be really interesting just to try to explain to people what these, these active pharmaceutical ingredients are. Just for a second, think, think about penicillin. Penicillin, basically, is made from a fungus. So what China is able to do is just make big bats of that fungus and grow, grow lots of penicillin. But on the other hand, insulin. You know, we used to get pig insulin, but now what we’re able to do is take an E. coli bacteria, take the DNA gene sequence for insulin from humans, and put it in the E. coli, and then make that insulin. So, some of that technology has been around for decades and years, but what China is able to do is to bring it to scale. China’s really good at replicating. They’re not great at originating anything. And then on these newer drugs that Americans are paying 1000s of dollars per month, like the GLP-1 medications for type 2 diabetes. Then now they’re making the knockoffs to it, which is not hard to do either.”

On the incentives of American manufacturing in the One Big Beautiful Bill:

“Absolutely, I know that Eli Lilly is already doing just that, that they are quadrupling the amount of API, the active pharmaceutical ingredients that we’re talking about, building more and more of those. Then that’s what we want to see, is we want to see private enterprise take this and run you don’t want the federal government opening manufacturing plants to do this. And we’re seeing other drug companies as well. And you know the tariffs are moving them over here as well.

“The One Big, Beautiful Bill is going to let them write off their manufacturing costs over a year’s time, bringing in those, big new machines, which are just millions of dollars, being able to write off their interest, accelerated depreciation, all those things, is going to bring the manufacturing of medications back to the United States, but the tariffs are driving this as well, which I’m happy to see. So, some of these, the EU makes a lot of the newer drugs, right? Maybe India and China dominate the generics and things like Tylenol and aspirin, and over-the-counter stuff. But, the newer drugs, Europe has a lot of the technology, so they’re good. They are actively bringing over a lot of that manufacturing to the United States as we speak.”

On solutions to Pharmacy Benefit Managers:

“So, think about a pharmacy benefit manager as someone that’s between the people who make the drugs and then the consumer. And these pharmacy benefit managers determine what you can buy and what you cannot buy. They’re actually taking about 50 cents of every dollar. Their profit margins are huge, and we have three of them controlling 85% of the prescription drugs in the country. So, look, I’m a capitalist, but when you have competition, when you have capitalism, but no competition, then that leads to uncontrolled greed. So absolutely, and we have a package of bills that I do believe is going to get across the finish line here.

“Senator Bill Cassidy, from Louisiana, is leading that charge on the HELP Committee, the health care committee that I’m on as well, but it starts with transparency, and that’s a bill that we’re particularly leading as a price tags bill that would show every consumer what the cost is for your surgery, for an x ray, a CT scan, and then on to the pharmacy benefit managers, forcing them to show you exactly where is this money going. So, I wish we could get rid of them completely. That’s going to be up to whichever Justice Department, those folks. But we certainly are trying to hog tie them and bring them back into competition.”

On how to bring drug manufacturing back to the U.S.:

“I think first, so we have to make it profitable and be able to compete. So, yes, indeed, China can make them cheaper than we do. But I would argue that cheaper is not always best, so we have to we’re doing the things. The One Big, Beautiful Bill, like we talked about, is going to allow the setting up of these manufacturing plants. It’s going to cost less money to get them set up. We’re going to maintain the quality as well. I think that’s the starters. And then there are all these precursors. Think about IV drugs. You know, an IV has sodium in it, has chloride, it has potassium, and a lot of that goes back to mining rare earth minerals as well. So, it’s deregulation and setting American entrepreneurs free, I guess, as much as anything else.”

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Contact: Payton Fuller