Question

Patents provide protection for new products in the marketplace. Patent protection allows pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs for a number of years without direct competition. This can result in extremely high prices for important (possibly live-saving) drugs.

Should this protection be reduced or eliminated in order to lower costs of health care? What would be the result? Explain your position in detail.

Answer 1

Answer:   No I feel that patent protection should not be reduced or eliminated in the pharmaceutical industry. The patent provides a company to market a drug without competition for years and allows it to price it at the price that can help it to recover the costs involved in research and development that may have taken years. It is not easy to develop a new molecule and research and development involves a high degree of uncertainty and risks. The high profits act a major incentive for the pharmaceutical firms to invest heavily and wait for years to get it into the marketplace. In the absence of such a system, there will be no major incentive for the companies to take such risky business steps. Currently there are many patented drugs that are coming towards the end of their patent life. The number of new patented drugs is very less as compared to the ones that are going off patent. In this situation it is important that for the future financial stability in the pharmaceutical sector, patent protection should be continued. If this is not done then we will face a situation where there will be nearly no research activity for inventing new drugs in the future.