I know someone who was part of a trial for an early (but highly unpleasant) Hepatitis C cure that was administered more than a decade ago. It was effective and he is still free of the disease today. He was on welfare at the time.

Many people forget how difficult it is to produce a good, generalizable cure to any disease. It requires billions of dollars with a lot of dead ends. Occasionally it pans out. No one wants to spend the money for research that may never produce anything of value but they want the product of persistent and very expensive R&D for next to nothing.

One of the biggest government investors in unpopular diseases is the US military, largely because they have a lot of veterans with them due to blood transfusions, environmental exposure, etc in the backwaters of the world. Organizations like the US Army are willing to put money toward relatively common diseases like multiple sclerosis, because it impacts their people, that the government at large is uninterested in because it is not politically sexy.