Are you implying that pharmaceutical companies would happily invest billions into a drug without patent protection?
As for patent protection: something needs to change there as well, because too damn much of the research budget goes into drugs that are no improvement over existing ones, purely to take market share from a competitor or replace drugs whose patent protection is running out.
source (look at the 10th and 11th paragraph): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-tru...