I like your comment, it explains a lot. It seems that the system was built the way, that makes a drug research to grow a pie, while in an ideal world where everyone is happy and everything is fair, drug research would shrink the pie: it is the goal of medicine to eliminate all diseases. It means, that all that system is working on self-destruction, but we allow them to get excessive profits now, to make it work.

There is only one detail I cannot understand. Why competition doesn't work? Why some new investors (who are not invested in drugs yet) do not invest in the research of new drug that heals all the diseases, to sell this drug for $1 -- they would destroy existing system, but they would get all the market at once. (Or in a smaller scale they might make a drug that treats some disease once and for all, and shrink not the pie overall, but some part of it).