If a company has a major breakthrough drug that produces high profits then its competitors have a substantial incentive to try to duplicate this drug in a way that circumvents the patent. In a regime where patents provide a monopoly, the availability of potential substitutes will have the benefit of bringing the price down, however if the drug were already selling at its free market price, without a patent monopoly, no one would look to waste resources developing a second drug that essentially does the same thing as the first drug.
This is the key takeaway for me.
Also, there is more effort on securing patents than there is on reducing the cost of research than there would be without the patent system in place. By having a patent system in place which grants monopolies, we have redirected the efforts of the marketplace to focus on attaining monopolization as opposed to commodification of the means of testing and improving medicine.
Not a very strong argument. I assume you have never heard of allergies or personal incompatibiities with treatments? Because of that you should be glad there are usually different molecules aimed at the same target.
And the means of testing medicines have their costs pressured down as much as they can currently. But please do not forget that there is a heavy cost of doing medicine research because of regulatory requirements (which keep expand from one year to another. further increasing the costs of developing new drugs).
Having goverments provide money to drug companies removes the incentive to be the first one to launch a drug on the market and I would expect it to significantly slow down research. This would be going the wrong way, just like NASA which has been so very little innovative for dozens of years. Hardly a good example to follow.
Commodification would also mean drug companies wouldn't put half of their spending into sales and marketing. Combined with what you quoted about a large portion of their research solving a problem that is already solved in order to work around patents, the whole operation starts to look worse than a sadistic government bureaucratic hell.
All the "capitalist dynamism" gets directed at phony/zero-sum games.
This is the key takeaway for me.
Also, there is more effort on securing patents than there is on reducing the cost of research than there would be without the patent system in place. By having a patent system in place which grants monopolies, we have redirected the efforts of the marketplace to focus on attaining monopolization as opposed to commodification of the means of testing and improving medicine.