A Modest Proposal: Limiting the Franchise

[Husar]

They may make more than it costs to manufacture an already designed drug, but pharmaceutical companies can't make back the literal billions of dollars it takes to design and test new drugs without charging more. If it weren't for Americans paying high prices, there would be not nearly as many new, lifesaving drugs.

I'd rather we find some way to force the freeloading countries to jack up their prices so we Americans aren't paying for the development of new drugs for everyone else.

You moan about patents - guess how many drugs would be made without them? Very, very few. There would be no way to recoup the large investments, so lifesaving drugs wouldn't be made in the first place. And no one would even have the chance to use the drugs. You can't pretend that companies will still spend billions to make drugs when they can't make the money back if your plan was implemented.

First off, the USA are not the only country inventing new drugs.

And secondly, while patents may be a good incentive to make people invent new things, they don't really promote a free market, and you should know that with such a quasi-monopole the price will be higher than it would be on the free market(the free market price would still cover the costs). Add to that, that with medication the buyer side is really inflexible and thus at a disadvantage(can't just switch to to a substitute) and your argument that the poor pharmaceutical companies really have to charge that much doesn't really hold up.
To counter Beskar's example you even said other companies would start producing the drug and the price would go down via free market, but that is not possible with patents, except if they can find a different drug with similar effects.
So at first you go and praise the free market and then you say patents are necessary because on a free market the companies couldn't survive.
So how could the companies solve this problem on a free market or does the free market fail whenever reasearch and developent are involved?
Maybe there should be a maximum length for patents, like one or two years, so the companies can get their R&D costs back and then the free market takes over?

We're also drifting away from the original topic, maybe a mod would want to move this into it's own thread?