Headline : Drug shortages and national security

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NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Marta Wosińska, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, about the rise in prescription drug shortages and what can be done to fix it.

We want to focus now on a topic that got quite a bit of attention on Capitol Hill recently - drug shortages. This past week, the Senate Homeland Security Committee put out a new report and held a hearing on the link between drug shortages and national security. And that might not be news to you. It's definitely not news to parents like me who spent some anxious nights this winter driving from drugstore to drugstore to track down infant pain relievers or for people dealing with extended Ritalin shortages lately. But the report put this all into context and said it's become a much broader problem and includes drugs that are critical for providing care in hospitals and doctor's offices - think antibiotics, sedatives and IV fluids. The big takeaway from the hearing - a warning that if the U.S. doesn't beef up its pharmaceutical supply chain, meaning how it makes and gets and distributes medicine, the consequences could be disastrous.

To help us better understand the issue, we've called Marta Wosinska. She has years of experience thinking about the distribution of pharmaceutical drugs, and right now she's a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. I spoke with her just after that Senate hearing and asked what concerns her the most about drug shortages right now.

MARTA WOSINSKA: Well, there are two things that worry me. No. 1 is that we have had shortages of certain drugs for well over a decade, and we have made very little progress in trying to address the root causes of those shortages. What also worries me is that the threats to our supply chains are increasing, and those are the geopolitical risks that the report really focused on.

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