National Security and Senior Health Care Must Coexist

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs last month, it didn’t end the administration’s trade ambitions — it redirected them. With IEEPA authority off the table, the White House is turning to Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, a national security provision already used to impose tariffs on steel, aluminum, and automobiles, and now potentially medical devices. For most Americans, that might sound like a distant policy debate. For the millions of seniors who depend on wheelchairs, ventilators, and prosthetic limbs to get through their days, it is anything but.

That makes this the right moment to draw a strict line: essential medical devices should be excluded from the administration’s plans to expand Section 232 tariffs.

Across-the-board tariffs on medical products carry serious unintended consequences. They can raise costs precisely for the population most dependent on consistent access to care. They can also disrupt supply chains if domestic production is not yet capable of meeting demand at scale. A shortage of medical supplies is a health crisis.

For millions of older Americans, medical devices are not a convenience — they are the infrastructure of daily life. Power wheelchairs and mobility aids, home ventilators, CPAP machines, prosthetic limbs, and hearing aids are what allow seniors to live independently, remain in their communities, and avoid far more costly institutional care. When trade policy threatens the availability and affordability of these devices, it isn’t an abstraction. It lands directly on the people least able to absorb the blow.

That’s the largely untold risk buried inside the current Section 232 national security investigation into medical device imports. The administration’s goal — reducing U.S. dependence on foreign, and particularly Chinese, supply chains — is legitimate. But the way those tariffs are designed and sequenced will determine whether seniors pay the price for a policy meant to protect them.

Here’s the problem. Medicare and Medicaid reimburse durable medical equipment at fixed rates that don’t adjust when manufacturers’ costs go up. When tariffs raise the price of imported components and finished devices, manufacturers can’t simply pass those costs along to federal programs. Instead, they face a stark set of choices: absorb the losses, reduce the quality and variety of products they offer, or exit the market entirely.

For seniors on fixed incomes who depend on highly specialized equipment with few substitutes, any of those outcomes can mean delayed care, degraded function, or loss of independence.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York drives the point home: roughly 90 percent of the cost burden from the 2025 tariffs fell on American firms and consumers — not on foreign exporters. Device manufacturers and distributors have so far absorbed much of that within their own margins, drawing down pre-tariff inventory rather than repricing to customers. But that buffer won’t last. As inventory depletes and contracts roll over, the pressure to reprice will intensify — and the costs will move through the supply chain toward the patients at the end of it.

More than 20 million Americans rely on durable medical equipment for basic mobility and independence. For this population, the consequences of getting this policy wrong are not theoretical. Broad or abrupt tariffs imposed before domestic manufacturing alternatives are in place don’t strengthen our supply chains — they simply shift the cost of an incomplete industrial policy onto the seniors who can afford it least.

What makes this especially frustrating is that the United States doesn’t need to build a medical device industry from scratch. We already have one — and it’s the envy of the world.

Approximately 70 percent of medical technology sold in the United States is produced domestically, across 16,000 manufacturing facilities nationwide, supporting nearly three million American jobs. The U.S. accounts for about 40 percent of global medical device market share, generates over $250 billion in annual output, and American companies invest more than $20 billion in research and development every year.

This is not a hollowed-out sector desperate for rescue. It is a position of genuine industrial strength.

The goal of Section 232, properly applied, should be to reinforce and extend that strength — not to put it at risk. A smart tariff framework would target the specific supply chain vulnerabilities that actually threaten national security, namely overdependence on Chinese-sourced components, while giving domestic manufacturers the time and market conditions to expand capacity in an orderly way.

That means sequencing tariffs to match the realistic pace of domestic production growth, pairing trade restrictions with federal procurement incentives that guarantee a market for American-made devices, and protecting North American manufacturing partnerships that are already doing the work of moving supply chains away from China.

Seniors deserve both a secure domestic supply chain and continued access to the devices they depend on. Those goals are not in conflict — but only if policymakers resist the temptation to treat a scalpel problem with a sledgehammer solution.

Saul Anuzis is the president of the 60 Plus Association and a Republican Party politician from the U.S. State of Michigan. He was chairman of the Michigan Republican Party from 2005–2009 and was also a candidate for national chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2009 and 2011 as well as a Member of the RNC from 2005-2012.