While I don't disagree with your point, the company that bought the patent paid a lot of money for it from the company that developed it. Patents being exchangeable is not necessarily a bad thing.
How do you incentivize environmental research? How are we supposed to find solutions to climate change if they can't be patented?
Copyrights are just as bad as patents, and musicians/writers shouldn't make people pay for their music/books.
We should start giving money to causes we support, whether it's art, medical research, software projects, etc. It's a mistake to think we should only give money if we're forced to by law (through pricing something that's not scarce).
The government does frequently fund the discovery of new drugs. The problem is that the return on that investment is usually abysmal and the taxpayer ends up not only paying to fund the drug’s discovery, but also paying absurdly high prices to buy it from pharmaceutical companies who passed some or all of their risk onto taxpayers.
Of course. Most of basic science in the US is government funded. I'm wondering what the OP thinks about removing the barrier that they identified (private corps paying for the trial vs gov paying for the trial) and how that would affect their thinking.
The government is the whole reason the clinical trials are required before patients can be treated with a working drug. They are the cause of the problem, not the solution.