>I'm sorry, but that is absolutely, categorically, and demonstrably false. If people are sick and dying, they have bottomless motivation.
Yes, but they don't have bottomless wallets. I'm sure a great deal of research would still happen in the absence of large potential profits. The problem is very little of it would lead to drugs your doctor could prescribe. The drug targets are the easy part - the hard part is getting a compound through clinical trials, and ones you get approved has to pay for the other 90% that didn't make it because they were too toxic or didn't work as well as existing treatments.
As a real-world case consider antibiotics. There's a huge need for new antibiotics - if you get the right strain of MRSA your doctor is going to be about as useful as the local faith healer. Same goes for a nasty strain of the clap that's making the rounds in Japan. Totally resistant to existing antibiotics - once you get it, it's not going away.
But for various reasons there's no money in antibiotics (or vaccines, either, but let's just stick with antibiotics). You don't get repeat customers, and the bugs will start to develop resistance in a few years. With no profit motive drug companies aren't doing what they need to do to bring new antibiotics to market. So there's nothing in the pipeline.
The concern, of course, is that if you did away with patents entirely every type of drug would be like antibiotics. Drug companies wouldn't exist at all, or they'd exist as contractors to governments (oh, and wouldn't that be efficient).
In some respects they do: often government or insurers are left with costs. The insurers make their margin upstream of this, so there's low price pressure on the drug manufacturers.
Also, demand for drugs is often inelastic, so people are more likely to make sacrifices here to pay for drugs. Which is fine in itself, but not when the high costs are the product of a cartel arrangement between government and industry.
>In some respects they do: often government or insurers are left with costs. The insurers make their margin upstream of this, so there's low price pressure on the drug manufacturers.
But governments and insurers don't save money by saving your life. They save money by letting you die before you get old. That was the ironic thing about the tobacco settlements in the US - the states sued the federal government claiming damages for the extra care they had to provide to people who smoked, when those people would have cost the state more money if they'd lived a normal lifespan.
In some cases a new drug will save money by keeping some damaging disease from becoming a problem and pushing expensive treatments far into the future. That's not the normal case, though. I'm all for helping people live out their threescore and ten in good health, but on average it doesn't save anybody money.
>Also, demand for drugs is often inelastic, so people are more likely to make sacrifices here to pay for drugs. Which is fine in itself, but not when the high costs are the product of a cartel arrangement between government and industry.
Here again there has to be some way for the people doing development to recover their costs. The patent system allows the drug company to charge more to every patient who takes a drug for twenty years. Without it that would all have to be covered by tax money. I like the patent system better, since it's biased toward charging people with lifestyle-related problems more money than people who take care of themselves.
Also, with the patent system companies will spend money on development for treatments that are within the realm of scientific possibility and not because advocates for that particular disease have more political clout. How many billions were wasted in the "war on cancer"? Government just doesn't do this sort of thing very well.
Yes, but they don't have bottomless wallets. I'm sure a great deal of research would still happen in the absence of large potential profits. The problem is very little of it would lead to drugs your doctor could prescribe. The drug targets are the easy part - the hard part is getting a compound through clinical trials, and ones you get approved has to pay for the other 90% that didn't make it because they were too toxic or didn't work as well as existing treatments.
As a real-world case consider antibiotics. There's a huge need for new antibiotics - if you get the right strain of MRSA your doctor is going to be about as useful as the local faith healer. Same goes for a nasty strain of the clap that's making the rounds in Japan. Totally resistant to existing antibiotics - once you get it, it's not going away.
But for various reasons there's no money in antibiotics (or vaccines, either, but let's just stick with antibiotics). You don't get repeat customers, and the bugs will start to develop resistance in a few years. With no profit motive drug companies aren't doing what they need to do to bring new antibiotics to market. So there's nothing in the pipeline.
The concern, of course, is that if you did away with patents entirely every type of drug would be like antibiotics. Drug companies wouldn't exist at all, or they'd exist as contractors to governments (oh, and wouldn't that be efficient).