This is old, but: a Sanders proposal I really like

[Recursion]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/sanders-bill-would-replac_b_69219.html

In 2006, the FDA approved 18 new molecular entity (NME) pharmaceutical drugs, and 4 biologic products. While all of the products were addressing real health problems, the total was sharply down from a high of 53 NMEs a decade ago. Only 6 of the 18 new drugs were thought to offer "significant improvement compared to marketed products, in the treatment, diagnosis, or prevention of a disease." In 2006, consumers worldwide paid an estimated $643 billion for pharmaceuticals. Legal monopolies on the sale of new drugs were responsible much of this, perhaps as much as $400 to $500 billion of the total. (Most new drugs can be manufactured and distributed for 1 to 5 percent of brand name prices). If the monopoly price premium was just $400 billion, this worked out to $18 billion per each of the 22 NMEs. For the 10 priority products (6 drugs and 4 biologics) that actually improve health outcomes, it was $40 billion each.

While we pay staggering premiums for drug monopolies, only a modest amount is actually reinvested in R&D. In 2005, only 8.5 percent of global pharmaceutical sales were spent on R&D, and only a fraction of that was invested in products that improved health care outcomes.

...

On Friday Senator Sander introduced a bill called the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act of 2007 that would provide a profound change in the way we finance new drugs. A link to the text of the bill and a detailed description of how it works is available here.

What the Sanders bill does is separate the market for innovation from the market for the drugs themselves. It delinks the incentive for R&D from the price of the drug. It eliminates all monopolies for new drugs, and replaces the monopolies with a system of large cash prizes -- $80 billion per year at current GDP levels. The prizes are linked to the ability of a new drug to improve health care outcomes.

The downside is that it's an attempt to rewrite an existing system from scratch, which almost always is a bad idea. But, it's a really cool proposal.

[joshcryer]

1. As far as I know prize funds and grants have always led to innovation.

I think it's a good approach.

What I'd like to see is an overhaul of the patent / IP system.