> Today, most pharmaceuticals are developed by the government. Private corporations take existing research and medicines, tweak them enough to be considered 'different', give them new names and then market them heavily to uncritical citizens, acting as parasites. [1][2]

There is so much wrong with that sentence, but it's written with such conviction and confidence that I think this reply is probably a waste of my time.

There is a huge amount of work, money and risk between government funded research highlighting a potential mechanism of action and actually getting a drug to patients. You can easily spend millions and years of work chasing down a promising project only to find out your drug doesn't work. Biology is really complex, most lay-people probably overestimate how much we actually understand. You can work decades in a pharmaceutical company and never see a project you worked on reach clinical trials, and even if you are lucky enough to get that far, it it has about a 10% chance of actually being approved.

To say all that pharmaceutical companies are doing is stealing and monetizing government research is demonstrating a real lack of understanding of how drug discovery works.

Source: worked in drug discovery for many years in both government funded academic labs and pharma.