The existing medical regulatory regime administered by the FDA requires shedloads of clinical trial results to be filed before a medicine can receive a product license, allowing it to be prescribed or sold to the public. There's a good reason for this (the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/ProductRegulati... ) but the way the system works makes it prohibitively expensive to gain such regulatory approval for a new medicine, thus pricing non-profits, academia, and small companies out of the market and restricting new developments in pharmaceuticals to a small privileged elite not-quite-a-cartel of large corporations.
'Twas not ever thus. Indeed, as late as the late 1970s, small companies were still producing new and interesting pharmaceuticals.
Moreover, drugs aren't the only source of cures. Certainly surgical interventions don't generally come from commercial drug companies. And some categories of useful product don't come out of commercial drug companies at all -- their record on new antibiotic development in the past three decades is dismal to the point of near-criminality.
'Twas not ever thus. Indeed, as late as the late 1970s, small companies were still producing new and interesting pharmaceuticals.
Moreover, drugs aren't the only source of cures. Certainly surgical interventions don't generally come from commercial drug companies. And some categories of useful product don't come out of commercial drug companies at all -- their record on new antibiotic development in the past three decades is dismal to the point of near-criminality.