Post by Fran Quigley

In this week’s episode of We Can Do Better, we talk with Mara Heneghan of The New School about “Public Pharma,” #publicpharma, an approach that can fix our current prescription drug crisis. An unacceptable four in every 10 Americans regularly skip prescription doses because they can’t afford their cost, a practice that we know can cost lives. Understandably, polling shows that affording prescription drugs always ranks at the top of Americans’ concerns. For our low-income clients and many with even more resources, this is a very real struggle—despite the enormous government subsidies provided to pharma corporations at every stage of the prescription drug process. Mara tells us that she and others have been working on a fix: drug manufacturing can and should be treated as essential public infrastructure instead of a platform for price gouging. In fact, it is already being done. California’s CalRx is a state-backed initiative that produces CalRx-branded insulin pens. The pens are offered at pharmacies for approximately $11 per pen – a fraction of the roughly $80 or more per pen that patients typically pay for brand-name long-acting insulin. CalRx is working on doing the same for albuterol, a medicine that is a critical need for children with asthma. Michigan and New York are contemplating following California’s lead in public manufacturing of medicines. The public sector also is starting to leverage its purchasing power to lower drug prices. Beyond that, the federal government actually has the right to license patents on critical medicines to generic manufacturers when those medicines are made unaffordable by monopoly-holding corporations. Our government has done this in the past, and should do so again. Thanks to Mara for the conversation. We hope you enjoy this episode. More references on Public Pharma are in the show notes and the Substack post.