FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

It is also interesting when does the social benefit of a drug outweigh the benefit of creating an 'incentive' for drug companies. If GLP-1 drugs are worthy of the hype, we're basically talking about 20 years of unneeded suffering and trillions of dollars of avoidable damage to society all to give a drug company a limited monopoloy. At a certain point the US should just eminent domain the patent, give them some reasonable compensation, and make the drug broadly available to all Americans similar to COVID vaccines.

SpaceX and numerous other companies were able to draw in billions of dollars of funding for R&D to chase after US Government contracts that could only be won by proving massive technological feats (reusable rockets, etc).

Hypothetically, it seems we could do something similar for drugs. Instead of "If you make a medicine that works, you get a monopoly to sell it for X years" it could just be "If you make a medicine that works, you get a check for $X, and then the drug is immediately generic".