Pills, patents & profits : Pills, patents and profits

In the case of the pharmaceutical sector, the people in question include not just the owners and managers of pharmaceutical firms but also consumers of pharmaceuticals. [...] In the context of the pharmaceutical sector, the key question is the prices which consumers best source of greater returns. [...] It risks begging the question of how to encourage the creative activity which leads to the existence of the commodity in the first place. [...] They dispute the assumptions used to generate the $800-million figure, particu- another important issue larly the treatment of the cost of using retained earnings in the pharmaceutical sector; is whether the current, this leads into the question of the treatment of one type of what economists term oppor- patent-based system tunity costs (as distinct from those types which are easily observed on ac [...] With regard to the TPD process in particular, the main question has been the time it takes for a drug to receive approval for sale in Canada, and whether the process has become so slow as to delay unnecessarily the release of valuable drugs.