NPR had an interesting segment this morning on the issue of Medicare's payment for experimental drugs under the new prescription drug plan. The piece reported that these drugs can be very expensive. Of course, in almost no cases are these drugs actually expensive to produce. They are expensive because of government granted patent monopolies.
It would be useful if NPR would occasionally talk about the costs of this patent protection. Economists typically get very upset over tariffs or quotas that raise the price of imported goods by 10-20 percent. In the case of the drugs mentioned, patent protection is raising the prices by several thousand percent. It would have been useful to note this fact.
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