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by miki123211
537 days ago
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> I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D Not just its R&D, but also the R&D of the 10 other drugs which looked promising, had a lot of money invested in them, but didn't end up working out in the end. You could very easily pass a law invalidating all drug patents, and making generics for any drug easily available. This would make all drug prices go down drastically. It would definitely work, there's no question about it. The anti-capitalists are very much right about this. What they're missing, though, is that this law would completely remove the incentive to make any new drugs. The progress of medicine would instantly slow down to a halt. All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured. |
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Unless there's government funding.
Also consider that for both patents and government funding, there are other jurisdictions which won't do what your government does, so there's a Nash equilibrium problem where every country has people who want to defect (delete patents) to get free stuff whose research was paid for by the profit margin in the jurisdiction which keeps the patents.