Dean Baker decided, with some good reason, that it was pharma-bashing day on Friday: first he pointed out that a huge drop in breast cancer came as a result of women taking fewer drugs, and then he picked up on the NYT's investigative report on Eli Lilly's coverup of Zyprexa's side effects. (There's more in that vein today.)

Baker sees pharmaceutical companies' patent protections as causing more harm than good:

These sorts of abuses are exactly what we would expect when the government gives companies patent monopolies that allow them to charge prices that are far above the cost of production...
Given the enormous cost of prescription drugs and medical supplies and the continuing patterns of abuses by companies seeking to maximize their patent rents, we should be having a national debate over the best method of financing research.

Now, I know what you're thinking here: What has any of this got to do with CPDOs? Well, I'm glad you asked. The answer is that most of the debate over CPDOs (and I urge you to read the comments section here) involves people desperately coming up with possible-but-very-unlikely ways in which they might not be able to meet their principal and coupon repayments. But do you ever hear such hypotheticals being bandied about in the case of other triple-A debt products, like, for instance, bonds issued by Pfizer?

Let's say that the WTO, the WHO, and the governments of the US, UK and Switzerland were to come up with a radical shakeup of patent protection and research funding in the pharmaceutical industry. I can definitly see ways of doing that which would benefit public health at great cost to existing privately-owned pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, and which could conceivably lead to a Pfizer default, especially if that company, too, were to turn out to have been engaging in some kind of cover-up of the side-effects of its biggest-selling drugs.

In other words, triple-A credit ratings don't mean that default is impossible, so can we please stop with the outlandish counterfactuals which are presently dominating the CPDO debate?