I'm not sure that making it harder for people to synthesize medicine is a good thing.

If it costs a billion dollars per medicine to develop someone needs to pay that cost. If you don't have some sort of government medicine research branch with a budget of tens of billions to develop medicines then private companies want a way to recoup their investment and then make a profit.

Is it impossible for government to directly fund research into needed medicines? It’s hard to see a value in this arbitrary middle layer between public interest and research. The amount of money people spend on drugs is staggering.

This is too big of a discussion to have in hacker news comments. But the decline in R&D spending, the amount of grants drug companies accept from the government, the amount of government funded research that goes into new medicines, the current state of healthcare spending in the US compared to other countries, the politics of it, the success of companies such as Cost Plus Drugs, and the amount of new medicines that come from countries that have much higher medical regulations all point to the fact that this is a bad system. I have worked on a few healthcare projects, and the general consensus is that it is unsustainable to have a system where health outcomes decline, even if profits are going up. It has been prevailing wisdom that patents help recoup the (admittedly enormous when you factor in clinical trials) cost of developing new drugs, but it has put the US especially into a really awful healthcare situation compared to other nations.

Long story short, there are enough sick people to provide medicine to and have a profitable business through a high volume of care, and governments are much better at providing long term financial stability than private corporations to burden the necessarily regulatory costs.

The pharmaceutical routinely pays companies not to produce generics of drugs that aren't patented, so I'm a bit confused by this statement.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/pharmaceutical-companies-pay-...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/three-generic-pharmaceu...

Pharmaceutical research can be funded with public money. Bounty programs, grants, et cetera. A lot easier to manage those than the obtuse patent bureaucracy.