People need monetary incentives to fight against the worst disease on the planet? Helping millions of people is not motivation enough?
The corporations who have billions and billions to spend on it, they need a profit motive to give someone a research budget. It's why they have the billions and billions.
It's not the only system imaginable, but it's the one we got.
Why can an Internet store convince its investors to operate at a loss, while a pharmaceutical company cannot tell its investors: "Hey guys, we're working on a freaking cancer cure for humanity, this is way bigger than space travel, so we're not going to be profitable in the near future, a'ight?".
However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.
At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.
Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.
In a healthy society--at least, a healthy society that is also as wealthy as ours--the solution would be to recognize medical research as a clear public good, and reallocate some of our society's wealth to fully fund both research and production of medicines.
What we have instead is...well, we have a lot of different factors interacting. But just to name a few: we have a government that has convinced us that propping up the military-industrial complex is the most important possible use for billions of dollars, and we have private wealth concentrated in a small number of people who will fight like mother tigers against any attempt to appropriate the smallest amount of their money for the public good.
But that's all complicated and unpleasant to think about. So...hey, cancer research is expensive.
The only diseases governments have helped us with are those addressable by public health programs (and there are quite a few of those, to be fair.) For the rest, no one has ever found a more effective funding mechanism than private industry.
There's something wrong with a system where the primary purpose of institutions who fight disease is to make money. Super-valuable research is treated in the same way as making widgets or developing Facebook games -- all that matters is how many dollars it generates for each $100 invested. I find it simultaneously outrageous and ludicrous that the yardstick against which the CEO of Novartis will be judged is how much money the company made, not whether it cured freaking cancer.