Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research Senior Economist, 20

This is not just a question of making health care affordable. There is a huge amount of money at stake. We will spend over $500 billion this year on prescription drugs, more than $3,000 per household. In the absence of patent monopolies and related protections, we would almost certainly pay less than $100 billion. Patent protections also add more than $100 billion to annual spending on medical equipment. By my calculations, patent and copyright protections cost us more than $1 trillion annually, an amount that is more than half of all after-tax corporate profits.

And, this money is very unevenly distributed. If were not for the patent and copyright protections on Microsoft’s software, Bill Gates would probably still be working for a living. More than a quarter of the Forbes 400 richest people owe their wealth in large part to patent and copyright monopolies.

We would have a far more equal distribution of income and wealth without these government granted monopolies. And, we would still very much have a market-oriented capitalist economy if Bill Gates could not get a copyright on Windows. The issue here is how we have chosen to structure the market, not the market itself.