Public Domain Drugs ?
From Techdirt:
We've written a lot about pharmaceutical patents, since pharma is often area that's a sticking point for fans of the patent system. There are a number of reasons why patents in the pharmaceutical industry don't make sense, despite protests from many. Studies have shown that patents are actually holding back the development of new drugs, making research more difficult and skewing research efforts away from what's most important for helping keep people healthy, to what's patentable. Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, for years has been talking about how patents harm medical innovations. One of his proposed solutions is to set up a bounty system for important cures -- and it appears that at least someone in Congress thinks this is a decent idea. Against Monopoly points us to the news that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a law in Congress that would set aside $80 billion a year to give to pharmaceutical companies in exchange for putting their patents in the public domain, in order to create competition for developing the drugs.
This would be a fantastic idea, it would mean cheaper generic drugs would come to market much sooner, and probably save Americans Billions on health care costs. But it's a pipe-dream, it'll never happen. The Pharmaceutical companies have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in their patents and they aren't going to give them up any time soon.