I think that having the government take drugs through clinical studies would increase development costs, and the increase in development costs (funded by taxpay

I think that having the government take drugs through clinical studies would increase development costs, and the increase in development costs (funded by taxpayer dollars) plus the fact that you have to replace the entire commercial infrastructure (since no private company will take part in this) would be larger than any savings you'd get from eliminating IP. People would end up paying way way more in new taxes than they save in insurance premiums and copays (people spend roughly $30 a month on rx drugs today, govt run drug dev and distribution would probably cost $60-hundreds+ extra a month, unless you're ok getting 10% of the life saving new drugs our society gets today) The profits in pharma accrue to the top 15 or so companies by revenue, because they have invested in this commercial infrastructure over decades. You could argue that having large scale clin reg and commercial infrastructure is actually more valuable than IP. Especially in the new era of large molecules and cell / gene therapy, where IP doesn't matter nearly as much as in small molecules. Regualtory and manufacturing issues are a bigger barrier to competition in those areas than IP is. Look at biosimilar development as an example -- patents gone, no new competing drugs in most areas. An exec at a top antibody developer told me they know competitors can work around patents, they just need a 6 month head start and then their best in industry antibody dev capabilities will get them the edge they need. Avexis, Kite and Juno were acquired for ~$10B each not because of their products, but because they had the largest scale manufacturing and clinical logistics set up in gene and cell therapy I differ from most people on this forum as I fundamentally attribute the high price of drugs to the high cost of developing drugs, not to IP granting monopolies. IP does not exist to grant rent-seeking powers, it exists to incentive publicly useful research that otherwise would not get done. I think that if you look critically at the cost of drug development and the economics of the industry, that's the only conclusion you reach There's a lot of emotional and biased information about drug pricing out there. It is one of the top political issues of the day, one of the few with bipartisan supprt, it has become an emotional punching bag for a lot of people who have been really poorly treated by an opaque and impersonal healthcare system, and i can understand the frustration people feel. But if you look at the facts and take an objective standpoint, and invest the time into understanding the industry, the public dialogue becomes quite concerning edit: apologies if this comes off as aggressive, i just feel strongly about this :)