A Next System of Health
The U.S. healthcare sector currently consumes nearly one-fifth of gross domestic product. However, this massive investment is inefficient and ineffective, producing highly inequitable outcomes for patients, communities, and the healthcare workforce. As a highly financialized sector, it contributes to growing economic inequality, itself an upstream determinant of health. What might it look like if we leveraged the incredible investments we make in healthcare to actually maximize the health and wellbeing of our communities?
Our work aims to fundamentally transform the health and pharmaceutical sectors to make that possible. We assert that broadening ownership and control of these sectors, we can democratize one-fifth of the U.S. economy and assure that the vast resources we dedicate to it go to the critical work of providing care, rather than being whisked away into financial markets where they benefit the few, at the expense of the many.
Healthcare will inevitably remain an important part of our economy – an essential service that will always require significant investment. We think it can be the basis of a new industrial strategy for the nation – one that’s designed to produce equitable and broadly shared prosperity. Linked at all scales to systemic Community Wealth Building approaches, the institutions of our healthcare and pharmaceutical industries can go from being engines of the extractive economy to engines of a democratic and equitable economy.
Democratizing Health
By focusing on broadening ownership and control of the institutions of healthcare and health innovation, our approach helps reduce regulatory capture, increase equitable access, and improve responsiveness to community needs.
We have been pioneers in the movement for public pharmaceuticals in the United States – the first to develop a model for a full supply chain public option from R&D to manufacturing and distribution. We work with partners at both the state and federal level to create policies, mobilize support, and implement plans to build publicly-owned and democratically controlled pharmaceutical companies that bring down prices, return money to public balance sheets, and provide good, public sector jobs.
We also design solutions for the provision of health and care services across the whole sector. Centered on the idea that healthcare should be more like a public service than a commodity, we create detailed plans for providing healthcare goods and services in the public sector and/or by and for communities themselves. This way, fewer healthcare dollars would be whisked away into the financial economy and more stay in the real economy, recirculating in local communities where they are most needed.
The Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN), designed and incubated at TDC, was spun off to become an independent organization: visit them here.