It's not remotely a normal industry. It's one that profiteers on medicine that literally saves lives. That upsets me, even if I understand it's the world we live in.

> It's one that profiteers on medicine that literally saves lives.

Imagine that tomorrow some software you have written, or just something you own in your house, "literally saves lives".

Would you be happy to be forced to give it away, if it's not what you intended to do with it?

Would you be happy to be forced to keep producing it at a loss to yourself?

> Would you be happy to be forced to give it away, if it's not what you intended to do with it?

This is not analogous to the pharmaceutical situation where they sell drugs and use the force of government to prevent anyone else from producing those same drugs. No one is arguing that pharmaceutical companies should have to give their product away. We just don’t like them preventing other people from manufacturing those same drugs.

> Would you be happy to be forced to keep producing it at a loss to yourself?

This is also not what is being suggested.

Would the same medicine be created (often costing large sums of money) if they didn't have the incentive of profit? What's the alternative that creates the same quality and quantity?

Software is the special case, I think. Plenty of open source software gets created because the developers themselves need a problem solved and then decide to share the result. If you applied that to Pharma, wouldn't that lead to the things being researched that researchers are affected by?

Plenty of medicine IP is created by taxpayer-funded university researchers and then patented by companies. If we eliminated drug patents, it doesn't eliminate medicine research because that's happening independently of profit motive (though still not necessarily independent of funding motive). It just eliminates the monopolization of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies could still make a profit because they'd still be important for manufacturing the drugs and could charge a markup for it. And since they wouldn't be paying for the patents and any pharmaceutical company could compete with any other, it could lower the cost to the consumer.

Sure, but would it be the same amount of research, i.e. if privately funded research went away, would the state funded research scale up? Would they look at the same topics, e.g. would you get sildenafil from universities, or would they concentrate on "the important problems" and not serve the markets that customers also want?

Profit is a very strong incentive, and it also allows customers to have a vote in what gets researched. I'm not convinced that a more centralized research system delivers at the same level, especially in the long run. It's hard to judge, of course, because we can't run perfect simulations and e.g. look at the monopolies in telecommunication and compare them with a market in the same time and under similar circumstances, but it suggests that monopolies aren't that helpful to R&D. You could argue that the universities would compete, but either funding would be based on output (in which case the universities would just replace the pharma companies), or it wouldn't be (in which case they wouldn't really compete).

I'm not a huge fan of the pharma industry, but I'm not convinced a system that doesn't incentivize research success can deliver the same.

> Would the same medicine be created (often costing large sums of money) if they didn't have the incentive of profit? What's the alternative that creates the same quality and quantity?

No, in fact they might produce different drugs rather than slightly modifying [0] a very old drug [1] because they can renew the i.p. protections and go back to selling lifesaving drugs to sick people at unaffordable prices.

[0] CellCept

[1] mycophenolate

one reason is because the ability to profit from patented drugs incentivizes corporations to invest large amounts of money in r&d for novel compounds (sometimes a minor variation of an existing old compound) rather than investigating the efficacy of drugs and compounds that already exist and have therapeutic uses since ancient times. This creates a system where life-saving drugs are so expensive that people need insurance to afford them, which shifts the cost to corporations and other people, makes the patient dependent on their employer, and prevents lots of people from even accessing the drugs. Then people react by pursuing "alternative' remedies that may or may not work, and may or may not also have their own side effects, however there is not a corresponding investment in the efficacy and side effects of these "alternative" approaches, allowing quacks and charlatans to exploit the sick, poor, and ignorant.

Patents only last 14 years, they are much less problematic than copyright.

Thats a long time to live with sickness if you can’t afford the drug because the law is written so that there is an exclusive right over who can manufacture it.