Comment by PunchyHamster

That assumes equal ability to manage a long-revenue-stream treatment that keeps people alive enough not to die but doesn't help them enough to stop taking it. Doable for somethings. Not so much against cancer.

And it assumes none of your competitors spot the cure that you suppressed or simply didn't look for and eat your lunch by taking all those patients away from you.

If you "accidentally" came up with a single-course cure for something like Crohn's or RA while trying to create a every-three-months recurring treatment instead, would you honestly shelve it? No.

You could make an argument that the incentives discourages certain types of research, but that's assuming a certain level of foreknowledge about how to treat or cure a lot of these things that I don't think we have right now.

No, this is the basic naive argument I'm responding to. It's nice to have long-term recurring revenue, but customers have a very strong preference for a cure, which means the owners of cures will outcompete the owners of subscription treatments. And then to say those cure-owners are in a "bad business", again, is like saying you'd go "aw shucks" if you happened on an enormous seam of gold.

It doesn't make any sense unless there is only one drug company with a total monopoly. Even if one drug company develops a highly profitable drug which only treats symptoms, all of their competitors still have a financial incentive to undercut them by developing a cure.

Aren't there ethical committees to avoid that? Health is not a normal business.

Goldman Sachs modus operandi is leaning too far on the parasitic side of the spectrum

That you can imagine an even better business model than X, does NOT mean X is a bad business model!