One of the challenges of patent reform is that there is a huge advocate of strong patent systems in pharma, and they are good at lobbying.
They care because patent protection is how they recoup the costs of FDA trials (which are north of $100 million per drug). Reforming patent law would become easier if they were given what they need in the form of an alternate form of temporary monopoly for having paid for the FDA trials.
What if the FDA enforced a rule where only one company can have an active trial? Then the first to file shifts to the FDA and the bearer has a monopoly for a few years, including the lead time before another company can complete a subsequent trial.
I'm perfectly happy with chopping down the patent law mess one large portion at a time if need be.
Trying to do it all at once is almost guaranteed to fail. In the present political environment it's usually better to start by taking legs out from the under the table one at a time.
The obvious solution is to exclude pharma from the patent legislation wars for now. Once a big portion of the economy is unhindered from patent trolls, then pharma can be re-examined.
If all that happened is that we free the radical majority of the economy from patent trolls, but were still left with pharma patents, then so be it, it'd still be a drastic improvement from where we're standing.
Or to socialize drug discovery using a competitive scheme akin to the XPrize with the reward being a free ticket through clinical trials and safety development (among other things).
They care because patent protection is how they recoup the costs of FDA trials (which are north of $100 million per drug). Reforming patent law would become easier if they were given what they need in the form of an alternate form of temporary monopoly for having paid for the FDA trials.