Writing in the British Medical Journal, Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz editorializes against pharmaceutical patents, at least on some drugs where their market is limited (
link here). He cites the large number of people who cannot afford existing patented drugs or who constitute an unattractive market for the development of new drugs. He proposes that governments create big prizes to cover development costs while making the successful discoveries available at the cost of manufacture.
While he would limit the drugs for which prizes would be created, he makes several of the standard criticisms of patents, a healthy stimulus to public questioning of the system. Moreover, for now he proposes a realistic way to deal with a part of the problem when it is unlikely that we will get a major reform of the patent system for a long time to come.