Comment by majormajor

Releasing a cure for a condition with treatments in the market already is a much easier sell than releasing yet another treatment that you now have to market to everybody on the current thing. If the first couple players are in a treatment-only business, newcomers are incentivized differently than those initial players were.

The more complicated answer is that if it's something poorly-understood where you came make different-but-similar treatments that will work better for some patients than others, and the current patient base isn't fully covered, there's still lots of incentives for treatment. Look at something like chronic inflammatory/immune stuff, and all the biologics out there.

But then the answer to "why didn't someone just develop a cure" isn't just economics and greed, but also nobody knows how.

In the surgical space, we actually do push expensive procedures over chronic therapy fairly often for things like joint or back issues. Of course, in that case, the economics are obvious - the surgeon and facility make their money that way. So if you can similarly convince the governments and insurance companies that your expensive cure is gonna save money compared to a lifetime of treatment (for surgery, this is being increasingly questioned, even), you can charge a lot for it.