Pay hospitals to buy American.

The problem

Hospitals and their group purchasing organizations buy most of the country’s PPE, and they buy on price. Asking them to pay twice as much for domestic gloves without paying them back is asking them to lose money.

What is already moving

Medicare already has a payment adjustment that recognizes hospitals’ added cost of buying domestically made N95 respirators. In its August 28, 2026 comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the American Hospital Association asked CMS to extend that adjustment to domestically made nitrile gloves, gowns, syringes, needles and other common PPE, and to define “domestic” the way the Make PPE in America Act does: made from domestic materials and components.

Why this works

• It acts on the buyer, not the factory. Demand created at the hospital level is the demand that lasts.
• It is cheap relative to the result. A few cents a glove, applied across Medicare volume, gives a domestic line a customer base.
• It rewards real domestic content, not final assembly of imported parts.

The ask

Extend the domestic PPE payment adjustment to gloves and the other high-volume items, with a domestic-content definition that matches the Make PPE in America Act. More in “The Nickel-a-Glove Question”.

Dan Izhaky · October 2026 · All briefs · Next: Publish the demand signal.