Cancer patients, people living with HIV, and families who simply need affordable prescriptions all depend on generic drugs. Most of those medicines are made overseas, in factories American regulators struggle to inspect. When a plant fails or shuts down, patients feel it first, in shortages, delayed treatment, and fear that the pills they take are not safe. A country that cannot make its own basic medicines cannot protect its own people. Congress can act. It can require clear labeling of where drugs and their ingredients come from, hold foreign plants to real inspection standards, and use the government's buying power to reward medicines made in America. Safe, steady supply of life-saving generics should never depend on whether a faraway factory passes an inspection it was allowed to dodge. Rebuild generic drug manufacturing in America and require transparent, enforced inspections for every plant that supplies our medicine.
