It seems that they don’t. The paper has a good article in the business section discussing how drug companies use illegal or unethical methods to push their drugs in order to take advantage of the huge patent rents available. However, the lengthy article never once notes that the patent system is at the heart of the problem. If drug research was financed through a mechanism that allowed drugs to sell at their market price, the incentives for this sort of corruption would disappear.

–Dean Baker

Dean Baker is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Read more about Dean.