Doctors Warn of 227 Active U.S. Drug Shortages as Primary Care Shrinks Nationwide

Two shortages, one warning sign

An ICU doctor telling a nurse there's no morphine left isn't a hypothetical. This is occurring in American hospitals according to Dr. Joseph Varon, writing for the Brownstone Institute.

Varon says he has heard some version of "we don't have it" more times than he can count. Sometimes it's an antibiotic. Sometimes it's a basic IV fluid, the kind of thing that has been standard hospital stock for decades.

As of June 2026, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) reported 227 active drug shortages nationwide, according to Varon's piece. Nearly half of the new shortages logged in 2026 involved products made by only a single manufacturer, per the same ASHP data cited by Varon.

The drugs on that list aren't exotic. They're dextrose injections, sodium chloride solutions, amiodarone, midazolam, morphine, and a range of anti-infective agents, according to Varon, who calls them "the plumbing of medicine." These are the drugs every ICU uses every day, not niche cancer therapies.

Why it happens

Each individual shortage usually gets its own explanation. A factory has a quality failure. A raw material runs short. A hurricane knocks out a plant. Demand spikes unexpectedly. Varon acknowledges all of these are real, case-by-case causes.

But he argues the pattern underneath is bigger than any single incident: the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain has been built for efficiency and low prices, not resilience. When nearly half of new shortages trace back to products with only one manufacturer, there's no backup if that one plant goes down.

Critics of that framing would note that low-margin generic sterile injectables, the exact category driving these shortages, often aren't profitable enough to attract multiple manufacturers in the first place. That's a market-incentive problem as much as a supply-chain-design problem, and Varon's piece doesn't fully separate the two. Both explanations point to the same underlying reality: too few producers, too little slack in the system.

The doctor shortage runs parallel

While hospitals ration IV bags, primary care access is thinning out too. PBS News' Horizons program, hosted by William Brangham, aired a segment on Aug. 28, 2026 examining what the network described as a critical shortage of primary care physicians across the country.

The segment, featuring Dr. Lucy McBride and Renuka Rayasam, laid out the consequence in blunt terms: rising insurance costs combined with too few doctors are pushing Americans to skip preventive care altogether. PBS reported that Americans die of preventable, treatable diseases at far higher rates than people in other comparable nations.

PBS didn't attach a hard percentage or a single study to that claim in the segment description, so it should be treated as a documented pattern raised by the program's guests rather than a standalone statistic. But it lines up with a broader, well-worn concern in health policy: fewer primary care doctors means fewer checkups, fewer early diagnoses, and more people showing up in emergency rooms once a condition has already gotten serious.

Calling it a national security issue

The Hill published commentary arguing the doctor shortage itself amounts to a national security threat, a framing that treats a thin primary care workforce as a strategic vulnerability rather than just a market inefficiency. Varon makes a parallel argument about drugs: a country that can perform robotic surgery and sequence genomes shouldn't run out of saline.

Both arguments rest on the same logic. A supply chain, whether it's doctors or drugs, that's optimized purely for cost has less room to absorb a shock, whether that shock is a pandemic, a natural disaster, or a geopolitical disruption to manufacturing.

Neither the ASHP data nor the PBS segment lays out a specific legislative fix on the table right now. The open question is whether Congress or the FDA moves to require manufacturing redundancy for critical generic injectables, and whether anything is done to expand primary care residency slots, before the next shortage forces another ICU pharmacist to send around that same message: conserve what's left.