Patents should never be awarded for life saving drugs.
Patents should never be awarded for life saving drugs.
While I support IP for individuals, I don’t support it for large companies and definitely not for drug companies.
I understand the money involved in making drugs, but you should not be able to monopolize a life saving drug and charge exorbitant money for it. Most of the initial drug research is done by scientists not associated with drug company.
Drug companies should be allowed to make back their investment and should be allowed up make reasonable profit. They should not be allowed to make unlimited profit forever.
Drugs produced as a result of publicly funded research should be manufactured and sold at a reasonable profit to support more publicly funded research.
The root of this issue is just having patents for those drugs and not allowing generic drug makes manufacture drugs that are a lot more affordable.
They are a lot more affordable because the generic drug manufacturers didn't pay for the research and development. They're taking the product of someone else's hard work, voting it, and selling it for less. That's easy when you didn't spend money developing the drug. There had to be some profit in making drugs if you want companies to do it but what I'm saying is that that should not be unlimited.
Drug patents aren't guaranteed for life. Companies get a 20 year patent and then a generic form of that drug can be made. The generic form is identical to the branded version so not buying generic is a waste of money, and don't feel bad for the pharma corp that made the original drug, they typically have made billions in profits by the time the 20 year patent is over.
One issue is that pharma corps will often change the formula or delivery method of their drug just before the 20 year patent is up. This improved version of the drug gets its own 20 year patent. The original patent for insulin can be used by anyone...except its for extracting it from animals. The modern day insulin is human insulin and produced in a different way, but that patent is different so the company can keep it exclusive. Also instead of selling insulin in bottles companies have created automatic injection systems, which is great, but those also have patents.
While that sucks, most countries have universal healthcare and don't actually need to care about the costs of life saving drugs.