

Dean Baker's Negative Take On Patents In Medicine - tptacek
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/tyler-cowan-recognizes-public-health-problem-of-pandemics-more-money-for-drug-companies?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beat_the_press+%28Beat+the+Press%29

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skylan_q
_If a company has a major breakthrough drug that produces high profits then
its competitors have a substantial incentive to try to duplicate this drug in
a way that circumvents the patent. In a regime where patents provide a
monopoly, the availability of potential substitutes will have the benefit of
bringing the price down, however if the drug were already selling at its free
market price, without a patent monopoly, no one would look to waste resources
developing a second drug that essentially does the same thing as the first
drug._

This is the key takeaway for me.

Also, there is more effort on securing patents than there is on reducing the
cost of research than there would be without the patent system in place. By
having a patent system in place which grants monopolies, we have redirected
the efforts of the marketplace to focus on attaining monopolization as opposed
to commodification of the means of testing and improving medicine.

~~~
ekianjo
Not a very strong argument. I assume you have never heard of allergies or
personal incompatibiities with treatments? Because of that you should be glad
there are usually different molecules aimed at the same target.

And the means of testing medicines have their costs pressured down as much as
they can currently. But please do not forget that there is a heavy cost of
doing medicine research because of regulatory requirements (which keep expand
from one year to another. further increasing the costs of developing new
drugs).

Having goverments provide money to drug companies removes the incentive to be
the first one to launch a drug on the market and I would expect it to
significantly slow down research. This would be going the wrong way, just like
NASA which has been so very little innovative for dozens of years. Hardly a
good example to follow.

