There's a bit of a drugs problem anyhow:

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/ero...

And, well, medicine ain't all it's cracked up to be:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/msqfdpan_0xudzuorebfbg

Which is to say, you're vastly better off investing in public health measures than in intensive medical interventions.

(See Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, for more on that theme.)

I agree. But the flipside is that without patents, no-one would be spending money on drug development, since there would be 100% probability that someone straight-up copies your drug that you spent 5 years and $50 million to develop, and can then sell profitably at a lower price and capture the market.

I think we can all agree that drug patents in particular are a necessary evil. On other patents (in particular software) I'm a lot more skeptical. And that's not to say "Big Pharma" isn't trying to abuse the system to maximise their profits.

Necessary evil: yes, to some extent. I didn't say "get rid of all patents", just that they can cause market failures.

I could imagine some models to make them less evil, for example by having a scheme that forces companies to grant fairly priced licenses to their competitors. Or, for drugs whose availability is in society's general interest, a government reimbursing the development costs. For both of these one would need a fair way of determining development costs, but as far as I understand pharma research already has a detailed paper trail to make sure their patent applications are bullet-proof.