Pharmaceutical Patent Lengths – More Generics for Everyone

As the years pass, the average length of a drug patent is increasing – patents from the early 1980's averaged around 8 years in length, whereas more recent patents now average anywhere from 13 to 15 years. There comes a point in time where we must question the motives behind the pharmaceutical companies and their conflict of interest: do they service the healthcare industry or the sickness industry. As a matter of fact, the United States is one of two counties in the world that allows said companies to advertise. What is the terminal result? In 2002, the profits of the top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were more than the total profits of all of the other 490 companies on the list combined.

The perpetual lengthening of drug patents represents a dire issue at hand – the longer a patent lasts, the less natural competition is born, and the longer consumers of these products must pay for the luxury brand names, when a generic product offering the same chemical composition could exist for comparatively cheaper.

The removal, or at the very least decreasing, of patent time will allow for more generic products to enter into the market place, thus removing some of the barriers to entry in the industry. The emergence of new generics in the market place allows the consumers of pharmaceuticals to have a greater choice in their products demanded and creates a competitive marketplace for the pharmaceutical companies – if generic A is offering what is essentially the same product for significantly cheaper, the brand name pharmaceutical will be forced to manipulate prices downward in order to stay competitive with the generics. Allowing this to happen will cause numerous endogenous circumstances to come into effect – less money spent on pharmaceutical products would be spent on healthier products such as produce, to act as a preventative, if not placebo-like, measure. And, more importantly, this allows such institutions such as Medicare to negotiate their prices better from the pharmaceutical companies by not being forced to purchase the name-brand and more expensive products.

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