I think drawing conclusions from one specific motivation in isolation is too simplistic. Many other profit interests benefit greatly from a healthy population that doesn't spend all its money on useless pills.
And motivations other than profit, both personal and political, are very powerful as well.
I don't think there is much evidence that eliminating the profit motivation leads to better results in general -- on the contrary. But there is a lot of evidence from Europe that health systems with public buyer cartels can achieve the same or better health outcomes far cheaper than in the US.
Although some say that sky high US drug prices effectively subsidise those European outcomes.
But insurance companies do.
American healthcare is a complex system of highly-incentivized agents. Zooming in on a single component as a synecdoche is like trying to reason how a car works by extrapolating from a fuel injector.
Additionally almost every industry is profit motivated, we wouldn't have the brightest people going into medicine unless it paid well. Ironically it doesn't actually pay well enough
That’s just semantics in the end. But it’s foolish to think that just because some endeavor is profitable is must be immoral.
A cure for Hepatitis C was developed by profit-seeking companies. Be careful what you're willing to throw away.
Setup a different system, and other motivations will drive their innovation, right?
Unless your claim is that innovation can only EVER be driven by profit?
1. Observed value drives innovation.
2. Profit / profit-motive is one of the most straightforward / most efficient means we have to observe value.
1. Human [curiosity, desire, necessity] drives innovation.
2. Profit mandate suppresses most of those innovations by promoting the few money making ideas (however beneficial or harmful they may be).
Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.
It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)
As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.
But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.
As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.
Until someone else develops a cure and takes all your business away.
Recall that a company blinded by greed developed a cure for Hepatitis C, not a treatment.
Socialist funded research is driven by politics, not maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.
Note that a lot of university research is funded by corporations.
I await your list of medical advances from the USSR.
1. ABC develops an effective treatment for diabetes, but you have to take it for life.
2. DEF develops a cure for diabetes.
Which one do you think is going to make more money? The only way ABC can make money is if a cure cannot be developed, or ABC somehow convinced the government to ban DEF's cure.
Your theory reminds me of the 1970s when everyone was sure that 100 mpg carburetors existed but the oil companies bought up all the patents for it so they could sell more gas.
Unless you're the first to cure. The income, grants, and knowledge drain in your favor? People will continue to get diabetes and a treatment will cure it.
So there are alternatives, and probably others we didn't think about.
"In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer began investigating acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement for standard common salicylate medicines, and identified a new way to synthesize it.[2]:69–75 By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it around the world."
> "It has been suggested that heat stress induces adaptive hormesis mechanisms similar to exercise, and there are reports of cellular effects induced by whole-body hyperthermia in conjunction with oncology-related interventions"
I wonder if the key is simply raising the temperature of the blood. My understanding is that processes like Regenokine extract your blood, elevate its temperature (which causes it to produce natural anti-inflammatory compounds?) and then inject it back into your body. Perhaps sauna (and exercise?) are doing the same, but to a lesser degree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autologous_conditioned_serum
It's available for sale
Well, if I thought that having sex for purposes other than procreation was illegitimate, I might buy that. I have the impression that some social conservatives believe that. However, I don't think that.
Also, we don't see as much industry effort to push contraception, as we do from the big pharmaceutical industries. Also, we don't see a problem of contraception not actually working; it can fail to work, of course, but most people who use contraception actually get the intended results. I believe it is far more common when Big Pharma tries to put into pill form something that could be obtained from good food or good exercise, that it does not work nearly as well.