If you reform patents in that way, you get cheaper EpiPens, it's true. But if you reformed it that way a while ago, you would have no EpiPens, because the maker wouldn't have gone to the expense of developing and testing them without the protection of patents (and the hope of profit they bring). Without patents, you only make thin margins; that's not enough to pay for developing something like the EpiPen.

Banning patents sounds good; it sounds like freeing technology from greedy capitalists. But in practice, it means freezing (or at least dramatically slowing) the development of new medical technology.

Why not allow patents to last 5 years, or 10? So the economic incentive remains while it becomes affordable soon enough; the Epipen was created in the mid 70s, it makes no sense for it to still have an enforceable patent.

> the Epipen was created in the mid 70s, it makes no sense for it to still have an enforceable patent.

The Epipen does not "still have an enforceable patent" because there is not an Epipen; there is a series of them. The original design is not encumbered by a patent.

The specific problem with patents and drugs or medical devices is the FDA decisions on what products are interchangeable. The reason drug companies get away with these "minor tweak" patents is that the FDA doesn't see the changes as minor, and so will not permit a prescription written for a new patented version to be filled with a generic based on the old unpatented version.

You can make the argument in this case that the problem is not patents per se, but the interaction of patents with prescription drug regulations. These sorts of "tweak patents" are useless outside the world of prescription drugs.