Pharmaceuticals are both one of the best and worst patent examples. It costs a company millions of dollars to develop, test and get approval for a new drug. A patent makes this expensive gamble worth while for the company by guaranteeing that they are the only ones who can sell the drug that they spent the money to develop.
That is only an argument for patents if you buy into idea that private sector / capitalism is the best answer for every problem. The fact that you need patents to shore up that idea strongly indicates to me, health is not one of the well suited problem. The other non-patent solution is funding the likes of CDC and NIH to research disease prevention and related drugs. In general the things that aren't (or shouldn't be) inherently profitable but are none the less needed should be socialized.
The difference is that marketing gives you a pretty steady ROI. Once the drug is developed, there is little to no risk involved in spending billions marketing a drug.
However, spending billions developing a drug without patent protection is a massive risk since drugs are easy to make but extremely hard to find. It would be trivial for a competitor to make the same drug at zero cost once its found to be effective. In this scenario researching drugs almost certainly has a negative ROI. Patents alter that calculation to make the endeavor worthwhile.
The system isn't bad just because you don't like their business decisions. I think the advertising budget is completely unrelated to the issue of patents.
If you want to argue against the fact that patent protection is needed for drugs just show some examples of recently approved drugs that are not patented, or that were brought to market by non-profits.
The safety and efficacy studies are both expensive and likely to fail, and I think there should either be public funding or patent protection for the company that bears this cost and risk.
