Profits are what drives innovation in pharmaceuticals.
Setup a different system, and other motivations will drive their innovation, right?
Unless your claim is that innovation can only EVER be driven by profit?
1. Observed value drives innovation.
2. Profit / profit-motive is one of the most straightforward / most efficient means we have to observe value.
1. Human [curiosity, desire, necessity] drives innovation.
2. Profit mandate suppresses most of those innovations by promoting the few money making ideas (however beneficial or harmful they may be).
Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.
It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)
As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.
But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.
As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.
Until someone else develops a cure and takes all your business away.
Recall that a company blinded by greed developed a cure for Hepatitis C, not a treatment.
Socialist funded research is driven by politics, not maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.
Note that a lot of university research is funded by corporations.
I await your list of medical advances from the USSR.
Unless you're the first to cure. The income, grants, and knowledge drain in your favor? People will continue to get diabetes and a treatment will cure it.
1. ABC develops an effective treatment for diabetes, but you have to take it for life.
2. DEF develops a cure for diabetes.
Which one do you think is going to make more money? The only way ABC can make money is if a cure cannot be developed, or ABC somehow convinced the government to ban DEF's cure.
Your theory reminds me of the 1970s when everyone was sure that 100 mpg carburetors existed but the oil companies bought up all the patents for it so they could sell more gas.
So there are alternatives, and probably others we didn't think about.
"In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer began investigating acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement for standard common salicylate medicines, and identified a new way to synthesize it.[2]:69–75 By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it around the world."