[smallblacksun]

Not 0, but vastly less than the cost of discovering and getting approval for a new drug. The vast majority of medical compounds are not particularly difficult to synthesize, meaning that the value of the process patent is relatively small. Once you release the drug, you will only have a very brief period before a competitor is able to come to market. In particular, they will not need to undergo clinical trials, which are very long (multiple years) and expensive (often hundreds of millions of dollars).

[mistercow]

>Not 0, but vastly less than the cost of discovering and getting approval for a new drug.

I'm going to need to see some hard data on both sides before I'll simply accept that claim.

There are also alternative solutions we could use besides granting the first company a total monopoly. For example, generics could be taxed early on in order to subsidize the approval process for new drugs.

[refurb]

Really? You'd tax the makers of generic drugs and then give that money to the big drug companies to subsidize their R&D?

Waston pharmaceuticals, one of the largest generic drugs makers in the US has total sales of $4.6B. Pfizer, one of the biggest drug companies in the world, has an R&D budget of $8.5B.

Even if you doubled the price of all of Waston's drugs through a tax and gave that to Pfizer, you wouldn't even cover half of their R&D expense.

Without a patent system, there would be zero incentive to create new drug. A drug company could spend $100M to get a new drug to market and with the typical 8 years of patent life, charge the exact price (let's say $100/month, with $90 being profit) to recoup their expenses (no long-term profit). It would be a SIMPLISTIC exercise for another company to come in and starting selling the drug for $20/month and make $10 in profit, having the benefit of never coming up with the $100M to get the drug approved.

I agree that there are alternatives to the current patent system, but like democracy, "it may not be perfect, but it's the best system so far".

[mistercow]

>Waston pharmaceuticals, one of the largest generic drugs makers in the US has total sales of $4.6B. Pfizer, one of the biggest drug companies in the world, has an R&D budget of $8.5B.

A couple of points:

First off, comparing individual companies to individual companies is pointless. I'm saying that the whole shape of the pharmaceutical industry is wrong, and if sweeping changes were made, it should be possible to increase both the number and size of generic manufacturers out there. Right now there are huge barriers to entry imposed by regulations intended to keep R&D profitable, and those barriers continue to act on existing companies with the expiration of each patent.

Secondly, you could quintuple the price of all of Watson's drugs through a tax and the drugs would cost less than Pfizer's.

>I agree that there are alternatives to the current patent system, but like democracy, "it may not be perfect, but it's the best system so far".

I think that statement is impossible to even speculate about. Yeah, we have much more rapid drug development than we used to, but that could just as well be explained by our civilization's overall technological advancement as by our obviously broken and destructive drug patent, approval, and regulatory systems.