Patently Stupid
The prevailing wisdom, as evidenced in this editorial from Nashville's Tennessean newspaper, is that letting drug company patents on medicines expire sooner will drive down the cost of drugs by allowing the production of lower-priced generics. As the editorial puts it:

Certainly, patents must be honored. They create an incentive for research and innovation which is crucial to the drug market. But in order to maintain a free-market approach, patents must have limits. The changes will help hold down the price of drugs and keep the market fair.

That's only partly true. Bringing generics to market sooner will mean lower prices sooner, but I suspect any move to limit the time period of drug patents will have the opposite effect on drug prices before the patent expires.I’m not an economist, but this seems rather simple: The pharmaceutical company's best opportunity to recover its huge R&D costs for inventing the drug, and its best opportunity to roll up profits, is during the few years before the patent expires, when it doesn't have to compete on price with low-cost generics. Shorten that time period and you force the pharmaco to charge higher prices before the patent expiration, in order to recoup those costs and earn the profit it deserves and desires.

Of course, if the patent period is shortened, and prices soar before the patent expires, creating a wider gap between the price of the name-brand and the generics that come out later, some politicians won't blame themselves for the high prices. They'll blame the pharmaceutical makers - and move to shorten the patent period again.

It sounds wrong, but the right approach to lowering drug prices just might be to lengthen the patent period a few years, allowing the drug maker to recoup its R&D costs and turn a profit over a longer period of time.