I agree that it is the obvious choice for medicine, but is it really the best option? Do we really have no other methods to fund medicine? Is it worth prioritising new patentable discoveries over other ones like making drugs cheaper or using them more effectively?
"Do we really have no other methods to fund medicine? "
We have. Public funded (also via universities) and donation based research.
But investment money is kind of big and if it would suddenly disappear, it will hurt current research as most (?) of it is dependant on it. But all that money would not necessarily disappear, when patents suddelny gets abolished, as there is also the option of increased secrecy.
Meaning they make effective pills, and work with regulators to test them - but share little about the manufacturing process. I believe that is already happening to some extent, but would likely increase a lot.
I think the current system probably funds it about as well as we could do. We get a bunch of startups attempting to push one drug through--succeed and it's a big payoff for it's investors, fail and they lose their investment. It's actually a bad bet for investors so it moves money from overly optimistic investors to the public.
We do have problems elsewhere in the system, though:
1) Drug ads. They should be pretty much nuked from orbit. Drugs are a medical decision, any promotion activities should be directed at doctors, not patients. I would make an exception for drugs that radically improve treatment for something patients might have considered something they just have to live with and not told their doctors about. (I have Viagra in mind here--and that's the only one that comes to mind.) In such a case I would only permit "there is a new treatment for X, talk to your doctor", no names of either the drug or the company.
2) Dodgy approval decisions. The recent Alzheimer's drug comes to mind.
3) Drug companies should not be able to find out what doctors prescribe. That creates a conflict of interest.
4) I question whether drug makers should even be allowed to do the phase III testing at all. That puts the researchers in a position where a no decision could be bad for them down the road.
On the flip side, I think we could benefit from having an appears-to-work type of approval. It would require extensive real-world use data (either from foreign use or like what we have seen with marijuana being widely used for chemotherapy nausea) but not the usual approval process. Obviously, no patents, but all companies selling it would be required to put some specified percent of sales into a pool used to fund more research. (And I wouldn't mind doing something like that for all drugs, albeit at a lower percentage. Every drug has say a 5% tax that goes into a FDA account for that drug. When there's enough money in the account to fund useful research about it the FDA does so. Common off-label uses would be prime candidates for such studies.)
That public funding has to come from somewhere, though, to the tune of quite a few billions of dollars. Do we really believe the tax increases required will be palatable to voters, and politically possible for elected officials? In the US, we can't even get universal public-funded healthcare.
Not sure the increased secrecy would help all that much. Is drug manufacturing that complicated that a motivated company could not reverse engineer a new drug solely from its off-the-shelf product, without too much trouble?
