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See that's what I don't get. Not calling you a liar or anything cause I hear the argument a lot. But if they are aligned with the government wouldn't it behoove the government to dump a shitton of money into these companies scientists so that way they can come up with more drugs, generic or name brand, and the companies would have about 100 year life span.
Companies that are leading the market are already profiting from existing science, and new discoveries threaten to disrupt the market—it’s often in their interest to prevent new advances from coming to market even if they’d be the ones selling them. (Say, a cheap vaccine that prevents a disease they sell highly profitable drugs to treat.)
If they make these potentially disruptive advances privately, they can patent them to preemptively keep anyone else from introducing them. But if the advances were made using public funding, they have to make the case that whatever they do with it is in the public interest (which can conflict with their own).
The more important factor isn’t the funding or lack thereof, it’s the ability to control the results.
Because long-term strategy in the current US basically doesn't exist. Voters want the results immediately and if they don't see them they don't vote the representative back in. The next representative wants to do their own thing and thus tears down what has been done to put their own stamp on it.
companies don't want to do the starting line work that leads to a product. Failure rate is too high. Companies come in once government and academic scientists have developed things to a greater point. The guy who invented the blue led did a whole bunch of experiments in direct contradiction to his company execs following the results of an academic scientist.
Generics are not anything new, they can only get made once a patent has run out.
The largest "public" scientific institutions in the United States are the national labs. Most famously, Los Alamos, but also INL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, NREL, NTL and some others I am forgetting. From my experience, their mission tends to be less aligned with "doing science to benefit people," and more aligned with, "doing science that's too expensive or risky for businesses to do themselves." Or, "doing science for 'national security.'" You see very much the same thing at NASA, where they consult and do science on technologies expressly to benefit the business.
In comparison, the largest scientific institution in Europe is CERN, and is rather equivalent to the US's national labs. Though I have no direct experience with CERN, from what I have seen from their experiments and practices, they tend to do science more for the sake of science compared with the American labs.
Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of the topic, but the point still stands, "the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit."