The vast majority of drugs wouldn't even make it out of the FDA approval process before the patent expired if you set the term to 5 years.

The number was merely an example. The alteration I proposed would be equivalently applicable to "5 years post FDA approval."

The typical window with today's regulatory framework is 7-12 years. Your proposal certainly changes that some, but it's not nearly as dramatic as your original framing of "reduce it from 20 to 5 years."

Lowering drug patent duration would explode prices upwards. Its much easier to recover 1B investment over 20 years than 5.

And this conspiracy that pharma is intentionally not funding cures to make more money is ridiculous. That would imply they know how to cure things, but just don't want to...

Explode prices for this first 5 years, maybe it would. But then, the improvement would have to be enough over the most recent generic that the consumer would actually pay the increase.

As to not investing in cures, I'm not saying they don't at all, but they allocate resources towards the best return on capital. And I'd ask you to apply your own reasoning, that "Its much easier to recover 1B investment over 20 years than 5" to which gives an easier return on capital.

Of course, implicit in that is that it's less risky to fund research in incremental improvements than on outright cures- but I'm open to being taught differently on that.

EDIT: fixing jumbled words