No. Fair compensation means that the company doesn't end up with a loss, and gets rewarded, but it doesn't mean "give them as much money as they could otherwise extract by exploiting the monopoly that the patent gives them on the market".
And withholding access to drugs that would extend everyone's lifespan by several years to maximize profits doesn't seem fair to me either. In fact, it's outright sociopathic.
These drugs are covered for the people whose lifespans would be extended by having them! They pay nothing! The situations where insurers/medicaid don't want to pay are more marginal cases. And even then, it's like, 1/5 the cost of child care in a major metro and only getting cheaper. If you're going to use an extraordinary mechanism to seize private property, it better have outsized impact -- seize surface parking lots and sell them to developers to build more housing.
Patents are a form of artificial monopoly that only exists because the people (acting through their government as a representative of their will) decided to have them, and did so because they presumably are a net social benefit. Consequently, governments are not obligated to treat them as sacrosanct, and most certainly not in a case where they are not beneficial to public interests.
It's a social contract between the people and the enlightened. The people always win on a long enough timeline. But the deal is there should be some sliver of reward for a brief window of time to those who bring permanent light into our lives.
The "enlightened" are the scientists who actually developed this stuff, not the CEOs and corporate shareholders collecting economic rent from other people's hard work who pocket the vast majority of the profits. If we only had to fairly pay the people who actually did the useful work and not all the capitalist deadweight, these drugs would be orders of magnitude cheaper.
And you think scientists should be working for the communists instead of the capitalists? Well that's fine too. Scientists are like spoils of war. Scientists were treated well and able to do a lot of good work when they were all employed by the soviet state. Maybe not as good as the Americans did. They also seem to be doing well over in China. But just because you don't like someone or how they do business, that doesn't make them deadweight, and no I don't think you know how to get products to consumers cheaper.
Let's not assume self‑interested corporate monopoly rents are a necessary precondition for innovation, and let's drop the romanticized notion that statutory patent terms by themselves constitute a just moral bargain, because history shows substantial discovery emerging from publicly funded science, mission driven nonprofits, collaborative consortia, open licensing, prizes, and advance market commitments, so we should test which incentive mixes work rather than presuppose one. Your "people always win on a long enough timeline" line doesn't answer the moral question of avoidable deaths, irreversible morbidity, or financial ruin before expiry; inevitability ≠ adequacy, and harms incurred during exclusivity remain morally chargeable. Commercialization does not require locking invention behind maximal (often crude, lengthy) IP, there are workable paths via milestone or frontloaded prizes, targeted or indication specific exclusivities, compulsory or voluntary licensing, patent buyouts, tiered pricing, and public manufacturing backstops; optimal mixes will and should differ across high‑income vs low and middle income country purchasing power. The "7‑year wait" is factually thin: statutory patent term is ~20 years from filing, while effective market exclusivity depends on regulatory data protections, biologic exclusivities, secondary or evergreening patents, litigation delays, and manufacturing barriers; patients routinely face restricted access even after nominal expiry. We also shouldn't conflate discovery scientists with development firms, nor firms with shareholders; in practice, salaried scientific labor is often alienated from downstream pricing power while financialization channels can parasitically extract surplus that need not translate into new R&D. Because many medicines and virtually all software have low marginal production cost relative to monopoly price, large deadweight losses arise when willing buyers are priced out, a staggering public welfare loss (and no, "deadweight" is not necessarily a synonym for "people you dislike"). Reading int_19h's rent‑extraction critique as a demand for Soviet central planning, and pivoting to talk of scientists as "spoils of war", is a straw man and a red herring that dodges the pricing structure at issue. If you want to defend the patent regime as a "social contract," we need to see the reciprocal side, access safeguards, anti‑evergreening enforcement, affordability commitments, otherwise it's a moral bargain in name only. Claiming membership among the "enlightened" means actually shedding light on these failures.
Noted. Given your 'Go vomit words' reply, I'll keep this short. In the spirit of good will, I'm happy to engage with anyone who wants to discuss the substance of the argument in good faith, including you, if you ever decide to change your mind. And, just as a reminder, there's no need to keep responding unless you're ready for a serious conversation.
“If you invest hundreds of millions and it turns out to be life changing, we’re going to seize it”