Comment by majormajor

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.