When kids say “I wanna grow up to develop a cure for cancer” the default answer shouldn’t be “That’s stupid? Even if you found a cure it would be to expensive to get to market. Why not do something that will actually benefit society like getting a law degree?”
I know it’s hip to hate on pharma companies, but at some point you have to realize that all those kids grew up to become scientists that are now working in these pharma companies trying to find drugs that will help people 20 years from now. But the fact is that the scope of research is limited by the financial reality that these companies face. If the net ROI on R&D goes negative that just means that companies stop investing in R&D and the first thing to happen is that scientists working on potential high impact low chance of success get fired. So out goes cancer treatment, while the team of people trying to figure out which color packaging for aspiring tablets maximizes chance of customer retention gets doubled.
But the process is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting : there's so many levels of suppliers/customers/expenses that may or may not belong to the same conglomerate, it's very easy to make the numbers of any individual organization reflect what you want it to reflect.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pharmaceuticals-r-d/pharm...