Public Pharma
Everyone deserves affordable medicine. Yet market failures, exorbitant drug prices, and perverse incentives throughout the pharmaceutical value chain prevent patients from accessing needed medicines, with disproportionate burdens falling on Black, Latino(a), Indigenous, and other communities that have long been excluded from equitable access to care. Our increasingly financialized pharmaceutical value chain also extracts public resources and produces substantial financial pressures for public health systems.
Public pharma provides a promising solution to rebalancing power and rebuilding state capacity. Public options reshape these dynamics by strengthening and building institutions that can compete with and discipline extractive market actors and ultimately deliver on the government’s responsibility to ensure people can access the medicines they need.
Explore HPEP’s latest public pharma work
Additionally, HPEP is proud to co-convene the Partnership for Public Pharma, an emerging group of scholars, advocates, and policymakers, alongside NYU Law’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic, and T1International.


