Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs?
Well the obvious answer would be through some form of tax based scheme that then plows the money into research primarily based on clinical need, which funnily enough is how a hell of a lot of the drugs that are actually useful get developed currently. But expanding these kind of solutions is very unpopular in the states from what I gather, apart from in the case of weaponry, so how about some form of kickstarter for medical research? People throw loads of money at products that don't and may never exist on there, so you should be able to get tonnes of cash by just repeating the word "cancer" a lot.
[edit] I went off and found some figures on this:
"In 1999 the National Cancer Policy Board conducted a survey of federal and nonfederal sources of cancer research funding [ 11]. The board found, for the fiscal year 1996/1997, that the total amount spent on cancer research funding was US$5.165 billion. The three major contributors were (1) federal funding, US$3.060 billion (almost entirely from National Cancer Institute); (2) industry funding, US$1.6 billion; and (3) funding by nonprofit organisations (e.g., Howard Hughes Medical Institute, American Cancer Society, Komen Foundation), US$305 million."
A lot of these arguments skip the obvious fact that the FDA could provide its own form of commercial exclusivity without needing patents at all.
You can't sell medication without FDA approval. Right now patents don't factor in to it, but if patents were eliminated the FDA could implement a similar scheme exclusively for medication.
I also suspect that the high cost of FDA approval is not treated as a negative by many in the medical industry, as it provides a nice high barrier to entry which helps reduce competition. This seems to be especially true of some of the producers of medical devices.
While this is a valid issue, it does demonstrate how strict a gate-keeper the FDA is. You can't sell anything with a purely medical purpose to anyone without the right certifications. I'm sure there's a lock on something as simple as tongue-depressors that can't be broken because getting your product certified is non-trivial. There isn't even an invention involved here.
Well the obvious answer would be through some form of tax based scheme that then plows the money into research primarily based on clinical need, which funnily enough is how a hell of a lot of the drugs that are actually useful get developed currently. But expanding these kind of solutions is very unpopular in the states from what I gather, apart from in the case of weaponry, so how about some form of kickstarter for medical research? People throw loads of money at products that don't and may never exist on there, so you should be able to get tonnes of cash by just repeating the word "cancer" a lot.
[edit] I went off and found some figures on this:
"In 1999 the National Cancer Policy Board conducted a survey of federal and nonfederal sources of cancer research funding [ 11]. The board found, for the fiscal year 1996/1997, that the total amount spent on cancer research funding was US$5.165 billion. The three major contributors were (1) federal funding, US$3.060 billion (almost entirely from National Cancer Institute); (2) industry funding, US$1.6 billion; and (3) funding by nonprofit organisations (e.g., Howard Hughes Medical Institute, American Cancer Society, Komen Foundation), US$305 million."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1513045/
So, for cancer at least, government and charity funding combined, dwarfs the amount spent by the pharmaceutical industry on research in the US.