Comment by fennecfoxen

Alternately:

The right approach for a company is to give up making medicine. Why would you spend billions of dollars on scientists to research a cure and fighting the bureaucracy for its approval, only to have the people and the government turn around and scream at you that they cost too much, and demand you should give them away for free? Heck, just look Biden giving away the coronavirus vaccines — not buying the vaccines (or licenses to the vaccines) and giving them away, which would be eminently defensible and a fine expenditure on foreign policy outreach — just saying it'd be fine if no one enforced the IP rights on these things, giving away someone else's work.

So forget it. If the dollars work out so that the smart investor should spend his money on something else, it will happen. Will this result in fewer cures? Yes, but society has decided punishing people for making money is a more important priority than actually finding these cures, and our democracy operates on the premise that we've made our bed, so we can damn well sleep in it.

(There will of course continue to be a few cures coming out of publicly funded research and academia, but if they need to fight for grants with every other project out there, there's no way they'll have enough money to have the same output.)