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Keywords

Reform and Dependency: Labor, Industry, and the Failure to Regulate American Pharmaceuticals, 1959–1964

Abstract

In 1959, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver launched the first federal inquiry into high drug prices, in a series of hearings which have been reprised many times over in the decades since. While Kefauver failed to pass substantive reforms, his work garnered popular support, and has received much subsequent attention from historians. Legislative action was not the only response to pharmaceutical profiteering, however, and scholars have not yet explored how unions and civil society groups responded creatively to the issue of high drug prices — by opening not-for-profit pharmacies, bargaining for health insurance, and amassing biomedical knowledge at the grassroots level. In this paper I place the activism of the National Retired Teachers Association and a coalition of AFL-CIO affiliates in New York—both of which developed substantial independent drug programs—within the context of postwar American welfare politics. I argue that drug companies co-opted progressive victories to thwart reforms, leveraging collective bargaining advances and community drug provision to justify an unregulated industry and inflated prices. Not only does this analysis offer the first account of an important episode at the intersection of mid-century American health policy and labor organizing, it also challenges straightforward antagonisms between the redistributive goals of the labor movement and the profit-making of America’s growing healthcare sector.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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