If all of that work and expense could be done by one company, and any other company could snap it up w/o having to invest in that research, then who in their right mind would invest 10's or 100's of millions of dollars into producing a product when that basically means they're giving it to their competetors for free? Sometimes when the product is sufficiently narrow in scope, even with patents, on a successful drug, drug companies fail to recover their investment during the patent's lifetime.

Get out of the competition model. It's inevitable that if patents were removed, most of the big pharma companies would have to figure out a new way to function. But is that neccessarily a bad thing? Big Pharma prefers to create treatments rather than cures, and advertises on false claims, in the name of profit (treatments rather than cures; antidepressants marketed on false claims). I have a sneaking suspicion that more nonprofit research would happen as a result of there not being a profit to make. I also have a suspicion that when there's no profit to make, we might end up with less extortion.