How Public Pharma Can Fix Our Prescription Drug Crisis

In this episode, we talk with Mara Heneghan about something called “Public Pharma,” which can fix our current prescription drug prices.  Mara is director of the Health and Political Economy Project at the New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, where she works on health-focused policy and programs. Polling consistently shows a disturbing fact: 4 in every 10 Americans report skipping prescription doses because they can’t afford their cost, something we know can cost lives. Affording prescription drugs always ranks at the top of Americans’ concerns, and certainly a struggle that we see as very real for our low-income clients.  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, which 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 critical 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. Not only is all this fully legal, 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. (See an explanation of that “1498 option below.) Our government has done this in the past, and should again. Here is some additional background about Public Pharma:   - *Prescription Drug Prices are a Problem–But TrumpRx is Not the Solution*, by Victor Roy and Mara Heneghan, March 2026, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-26/prescription-drug-prices-trumprx - The New School’s Institute on Race, Power, and the Political Economy,   https://racepowerpolicy.org/ - Democracy Collaborative, *Why We Need a Public Option in Pharma*, https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/medicine-for-all-the-case-for-a-public-option-in-the-pharmaceutical-industry - Chris Morten,*Who’s Afraid of Section 1498?* https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty\_scholarship/2810/