But the point is.... if any medical device could license any patent (doesn't matter what patent it is) for no more than 5% of manufacturer->distributor sales price, there would still be reason to fight bogus patents, but prices would drop because you'd only get 5% of manufacturing royalties for 20 years, not 20 years of monopoly rights.
If you get rid of software patents, this problem becomes quite manageable in the medical world.
This is precisely what patents are designed to do: create monopolies.
But as usual with politics, it is easier to create more laws to try to patch up some of the consequences of a bad policy than to fix the actual policy. (All the laws intended to deal with the fallout from the failed Drug Prohibition are another good example.)
All this reminds me of how amusing it was when Microsoft was being persecuted for antitrust violations when their whole business model was based on copyright, which again is based on government granted monopolies.
But of course when the lives and health of people are involved the farce turns to tragedy.
That's half of what monopolies are supposed to do, in my layman's observation of the field (i.e. everything I know I learned on HN). The other half is to encourage the dissemination of innovation to the benefit of society.
What we have now is the first half, the monopoly. The second half is disappearing, replaced by patent holders preventing innovation from moving through society, and removing the use of what was once obvious from society.
[1] For example, through medicare reimbursement rates the government strongly influences the pay rates of different types of doctors, and mandates that the gap in wages between a GP and a specialist be about twice what it is in other countries, which results in the US having lots of specialists but a huge lack of GPs compared to other countries, which means we do a very poor job of catching problems early, etc. EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource-based_relative_value_s...
This is not a patch on the patent system. This is a fundamental change in moving from a monopoly grant to a grant of rent for research. This is a huge change. I'd be willing to trade moderate extension of patent terms (say to 25 years) to accomplish this.