My father is a professor and doctor of medicine at one of the most esteemed medical schools in the country. He is 100% sure that without patents we simply wouldn't have most of the drugs we have today. They are far too expensive to develop and then have your competitors copy. The government funding for these projects is pitifully small and slow (I can say that from an academic non-medicine perspective as well). Non-profits are pretty much useless as well since they have nowhere near the funds.
Drug development seems to be the case where the patent system actually works and I wonder if that is due to having one patent per product? Elsewhere you get patent thickets and invention choked off by multiple ownership. Perhaps a useful reform would be to insure that no product is encumbered by more than one patent. This could be done by letting the most inventive patent covering a particular product be the trump patent. Minor patents would lose their nusiance value. Research incentives would be turned upside-down. Instead of doing cheap research to get a trivial patent and a seat at the bargining table to leech off real inventors, expensive research, aimed at major breakthroughs would be the only way to win.
