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I think it's a good thing.
Simply put, if you have to do all the research and testing and then anyone can come along to sell your product for their own profit, you don't have much incentive to start out, do you? We're easily talking millions of dollars, not something you can afford to lose often.
Regarding the supposed lack of research, the reason it takes so long to develop much of anything, and the cause of the high cost, -is- the testing. It's often (not always) easy enough to set up a construction line for a product and just feed it to whomever's willing to take a risk, but governments don't allow that anymore.
More importantly, the patent is temporary. It does allow for a monopoly but not indefinately.
Typically, they last 20 years. The average drug takes 12 years to develop from the point of discovering a useful substance. That means the company has just eight years to earn back the money spent. On top of that there's the problem of getting people to actually use your product instead of someone else's which has been used in treatment up to that point. After the eight years, anyone can make a generic product and sell them at far lower prices as they don't have to earn back nearly as many research and development costs.
Also, you have to remember that before this time, there was no such drug available (or a patent wouldn't be granted). Companies are not raising prices to spite the patients (mostly); in fact, there were no low prices to begin with. And everyone's free to keep using the traditional treatments.
Of course it doesn't seem to make sense that a potentially succesful cure can't be given to someone yet despite being discovered and produced in small quantities, but really, it does take that long. The other thing to remember is that companies trying to sell their drugs at ridiculous prices, won't sell anything, and won't earn back a thing either. So they won't.
It keeps the industry going and invites people to do research without freezing anything forever. The only downside is few people are interested in developing orphan drugs, compounds which cure relatively rare diseases. There's no big market there and only little money to be made. That'll take government funding to set up, which is sometimes being made available. However, you'll have to agree that researching a cure to improve the qualty of millions of lives is more worthwhile than one improving that of a dozen.
As for the trouble in Dutch hospitals, not being able to afford top quality drugs for all of their patients because of the high prices, I think that's more a result of severe cuts in government funding than an unusually sharp increase in drug prices.
[ 03-06-2005, 03:43 PM: Message edited by: Legolas ]
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