My point is this: assume a world where free market maximalists win and patents (for drugs) get abolished, in the hope of reduced prices from increased competition. Since the reasoning is free market maximalism, this society will almost certainly not force companies to publish their drug formulas, it will allow them to keep these formulae a secret.

My contention is that in this case, the hoped for market competition would not materialize, drug prices would stay roughly the same for novel medicine normally covered by patents today. I admit that this may only be true for some drugs, not for all - some drugs may indeed be very easy to reverse engineer, and those would benefit from such a change. For example, the use of lithium to treat bipolar disorder would probably be easily reverse engineered and transformed and generic alternatives would quickly appear.

What I was pointing out with the generics part is that the formula publication requirement of patents is in practice having a significant positive impact today - all drugs that are off patent are being successfully synthesized and sold much more cheaply by generics drug manufacturers. This only happens for drugs that are far too old, so I'm not a fan of this system, but I think there is a real risk that even this small thing will get lost if we replaced patents with trade secrets.