The existing medical regulatory regime administered by the FDA requires shedloads of clinical trial results to be filed before a medicine can receive a product license, allowing it to be prescribed or sold to the public. There's a good reason for this (the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/ProductRegulati... ) but the way the system works makes it prohibitively expensive to gain such regulatory approval for a new medicine, thus pricing non-profits, academia, and small companies out of the market and restricting new developments in pharmaceuticals to a small privileged elite not-quite-a-cartel of large corporations.

'Twas not ever thus. Indeed, as late as the late 1970s, small companies were still producing new and interesting pharmaceuticals.

Moreover, drugs aren't the only source of cures. Certainly surgical interventions don't generally come from commercial drug companies. And some categories of useful product don't come out of commercial drug companies at all -- their record on new antibiotic development in the past three decades is dismal to the point of near-criminality.

And many cures come from publicly funded research universities. And even those commercial drug companies benefit greatly from government subsidies, patents issued by the government, roads built by the government, and a population educated in public universities. It's disingenuous to pretend those "commercial" drug companies forged their own universe and created these products benevolently.

I suppose that would be disingenuous... if anyone were to suggest it.

You have no idea, of those government provisions you listed, what the actual costs are. You won't be able to get the most efficient allocation of resources, because it's not a market allocation (people freely paying), but a political allocation.

Oh, and I don't care if a drug company is benevolent. Just that they are free to offer me the goods at a price that isn't rigged (as by regulation of competitors, for example).

Actually, the majority of the money for curing the diseases that affect the most people comes from government.