Prizes link to politics too
Fisher III & Syed 17 *WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Harvard University, **Assistant Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley (William W. Fisher III and Talha Syed, “Chapter 5: Prizes” in Infection: The Health Crisis in the Developing World and What We Should Do About It, https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/Infection_Prizes.pdf) AM
A second, more important consideration against a general prize system has already been mentioned: political palatability. It’s hard enough to imagine Congress (or any other national legislature) adopting in the foreseeable future a prize system that would encompass all pharmaceutical or medical innovations pertaining to the diseases that currently ravage developing countries. The unpopularity of tax increases, coupled with the widespread sentiment that the patent system, outside the sphere of neglected and global diseases, is not yet “broken,” make it extremely unlikely that Congress would be willing to reach even further.