I've wandered down this road before, but I'm always confused by conservatives who glance at concerns over pharmaceutical pricing and pronounce that if you took away all pharma's money, they couldn't develop any new drugs. Hah! Game, set, match. To paraphrase Popeye, things is what they is, and that's all that they is. Economic theory? Meet the system in question. Drug innovation is drying up, and pharma's priorities are increasingly misdirected. As Merrill Goozner, author of The $800 Million Pill, writes, "The financial incentives formed by the stock market force R&D decision-makers to focus most of their attention on developing blockbuster drugs for proven mass markets. Minor aches and pains, allergies, depression, cholesterol management, acid indigestion – the rewards for a successful new entry in one of these categories, whether or not it represents a significant new advance over previous therapies, are measured in the billions of dollars in sales." The result? "Between 1989 and 2000, 58 percent of the 361 new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the FDA were considered “standard” for review purposes, that is, they did not represent a significant advance over existing therapies. And in the first ten months of 2007, when the FDA approved just 14 NMEs, eight were considered standard – almost the exact same percentage as the earlier era." In other words, they were profit drugs, rather than new drugs. A NEW PAGE FOR PHARMA.
I've wandered down this road before, but I'm always confused by conservatives who glance at concerns over pharmaceutical pricing and pronounce that if you took away all pharma's money, they couldn't develop any new drugs. Hah! Game, set, match. To paraphrase Popeye, things is what they is, and that's all that they is. Economic theory? Meet the system in question. Drug innovation is drying up, and pharma's priorities are increasingly misdirected. As Merrill Goozner, author of The $800 Million Pill, writes, "The financial incentives formed by the stock market force R&D decision-makers to focus most of their attention on developing blockbuster drugs for proven mass markets. Minor aches and pains, allergies, depression, cholesterol management, acid indigestion – the rewards for a successful new entry in one of these categories, whether or not it represents a significant new advance over previous therapies, are measured in the billions of dollars in sales." The result? "Between 1989 and 2000, 58 percent of the 361 new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the FDA were considered “standard” for review purposes, that is, they did not represent a significant advance over existing therapies. And in the first ten months of 2007, when the FDA approved just 14 NMEs, eight were considered standard – almost the exact same percentage as the earlier era." In other words, they were profit drugs, rather than new drugs. 
