The Health and Political Economy Project (HPEP) at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy aims to build a just and inclusive economy that enables all people to experience health and dignity.

As a field catalyst, HPEP works to shift paradigms and build power to realize this vision:

• Paradigm-shifting seeds and socializes new ideas through scholarship and policy ideation.
• Power-building translates paradigm into real-world adoption by working alongside organizers, health workers, practitioners, and public servants to realize this vision.

Our Areas of Work

We focus our action on three interconnected areas: capital, care and culture.

Capital involves ending the growing financialization of health and prioritizing investments in health that build public capacity and affirmatively include marginalized groups.

Care involves strengthening and valuing care as essential infrastructure for health and wellbeing across each person’s life and across our communities.

Culture involves changing hearts and minds about the many links between health and our economy, using the power of stories to shift attitudes, and inspiring new narratives to displace prevailing economic thinking.

Alongside overarching work across this framework to examine structural economic and health trends, HPEP is currently leading projects on a range of topics, including:

• De-financializing public health insurance;
• Supporting public pharmaceutical efforts across the country, and 
• Exploring and addressing healthcare affordability challenges through a range of policies including understanding cash as a tool for better health for young families, investigating the impact of baby bonds on health, and shifting momentum from medical debt cancellation to medical debt prevention.

Our Team

HPEP is co-chaired by Professor Darrick Hamilton (founding Director, Institute for Race, Power and Political Economy; Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School) and Dr. Dave A. Chokshi (Sternberg Family Professor of Leadership at City College of New York and former NYC Health Commissioner), with Mara Heneghan as Director (policy strategist, formerly at Cook County President’s and Chicago Mayor's office). Dr. Victor Roy is an Institute Fellow working closely on projects across HPEP’s portfolio (physician, sociologist, and Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania).

Why HPEP?

The U.S. is experiencing a decades-long population health crisis, with stagnating life expectancy and preventable suffering and premature death. These unacceptable tragedies arise in part from an outdated economic paradigm that privileges free market thinking and individualistic cultural narratives and are borne unequally across race and ethnicity.

Rather than take this system as fixed, we ask: what is the purpose of our economy? We view the economy as iteratively intertwined with politics and identity group stratification, especially by identities such as race, gender, and national origin. We believe we can craft the iterative relationship between these, known as political economy, to prioritize the health, dignity, and wellbeing of people and society.

HPEP’s founding premise is that bold strategy and collaborative action can change the status quo and reorient how policymakers, practitioners, and patients alike see and act on the connections between our political economy and our health. 

Get In Touch

We’re eager to connect! You can email hpepinfo@newschool.edu to get in touch.