>while those who sell the cure will make practically all the money
Why would they release a cure when they could make more money releasing their own chronic treatment instead?
Why would they release a cure when they could make more money releasing their own chronic treatment instead?
People will travel to rogue jurisdictions that choose to make money by defecting, some may even invalidate patents like India.
You can't go to India for a cure that doesn't exist.
Once there is enough research, you can have grey-ish market commercialization.
cancer immunotherapy works, and at times (maybe even often) is curative. Same with stem cells. Zolgensma, a one time cure that costs 2 million dollars, also exists.
Public goods funding as a thing also exists.
I'm not so pessimistic about it. There is still a profit incentive.
This is only true if a company is confident that all other companies are also not working on a cure. That may be feasible when dealing with a local service or commodity (as you only have to come to a wink wink agreement with other companies in the local area) or when only a few companies control a large amount of a limited resource (like OPEC). That does not work well when dealing with an idea or technology.
Any company anywhere in the world could decide to research a cure. A Nation State-run research group could do it and just give the patent away. It is virtually impossible to get all of them to not research it, and if any of them anywhere find a cure, your treatment profits fall off a cliff. So it makes fiscal sense to sell the treatment, use your market position to get the best data on the condition, and research a cure so you can be first to market and control the distribution of the cure and ensure that the profits go back to you.
The more complicated answer is that if it's something poorly-understood where you came make different-but-similar treatments that will work better for some patients than others, and the current patient base isn't fully covered, there's still lots of incentives for treatment. Look at something like chronic inflammatory/immune stuff, and all the biologics out there.
But then the answer to "why didn't someone just develop a cure" isn't just economics and greed, but also nobody knows how.
In the surgical space, we actually do push expensive procedures over chronic therapy fairly often for things like joint or back issues. Of course, in that case, the economics are obvious - the surgeon and facility make their money that way. So if you can similarly convince the governments and insurance companies that your expensive cure is gonna save money compared to a lifetime of treatment (for surgery, this is being increasingly questioned, even), you can charge a lot for it.
Because the probability of finding a cure, chronic or not, is extremely small.