Controversial Differences Between Patents And Patients

Patents are granted by national governments to applicants who establish that an invention is new, useful, and not "obvious" to someone in the same technical area as the inventor. But are patents a tool for promoting the development of medical treatments for patients or merely a roadblock to access to health care? This is a perennial question to which there are often strenuous opinions. The increasingly important intersection between patents, health care access and innovation has further made the issue controversial. Whether there is any need to "choose" between patents and patients is an intriguing yet controversial question. To some, patents seem to clearly undermine the goal of providing drugs at the lowest possible costs because the exclusivity inherent with patent rights provides an incentive for profits . To others, there is no conflict at all because patents are seen as the driver of innovation that will inevitably benefit all of society and even facilitate the genesis for low-cost generic drugs. So, which view

Companies that develop new drugs suggest that patent protection is critical because drugs are simple to reverse engineer, such that another company could easily and unfairly appropriate profits without the protection of patents. Drug companies also point to the fact that the regulatory approval process required before a drug can be sold can diminish the effective patent term as usually patent term is hort. They argue that since a drug cannot be sold without regulatory approval regardless of its patent situation, companies are justified in charging higher costs during the shortened patent term. In addition, they note that because generics can quickly and effectively compete once the patent term expires, the patent exclusivity is critical to recoup some of the cost of drug discovery and to provide enough financial support to enable new