The world is a very small place, if you’re going by the health care debate in this country.  You have the U.S., you have Canada, you have the U.K., and you have “All Others,” where they may or may not have medical care.  It’s preposterous, of course, and usually only done to make a specific point about “the evils of government involvement in health care.”  The plain truth is we’re never going to swap out our health care system for that of another country’s wholesale.  But if we really want to argue whether government intervention is necessary to reform our broken system, we need to look at the world around us.
Jonathan Cohn has a lengthy and highly-recommended article in today’s Boston Globe talking about, among other things, how poorly France and the Netherlands fit the stereotypes and talking points about what happens when government gets involved in health care.  The two countries are on opposite ends of the spectrum.  The Netherlands provides universal health care largely through private insurance companies;  France has universal basic medical care through a single-payer, with 98% of the population also opting to buy supplemental coverage through a private company.  (Yes, that means France has nearly covered its entire population twice over, and still spends less than we do as a percentage of GDP).  But both feature strong government involvement in terms of much heavier regulation of private insurers than anything we’re proposing today.  Yet they make terrible talking points for those who want to warn against the ills of government involvement.

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As bird in the sky said, there's always going to be sick people. Even if one disease is cured, and some of the pharmaceutical company's products go obsolete, there's always another disease to work on. In the meantime, whichever company releases the cure for the disease gets to reap the enormous profits and prestige of that cure. I don't think any company would turn away the opportunity to sell 6.5 billion doses of a drug just because it would hurt sales of their cough medicine in the long run.The marketing value of the cure alone would make it worth releasing. If you are looking for a drug to treat your sniffles, which company are you going to prefer, the one that also released the cure for AIDS, or their competitor that wasn't able to find that cure? Even if all the major diseases were cured, there would be a huge market opened for all manner of pharmaceuticals aimed at alleviating the myriad ailments that accompany old age. With the major diseases gone, everyone will live to be a hundred years or more - each of them taking arthritis medicine, vitamins, metabolic supplements, Viagara, osteoporosis counter-measures, maybe even memory enhancers, mood alterants and ocular nerve maitenance medications every day.A steady source of elderly people 'addicted' to the higher quality of life possible through pharmacy would be an incredible boon to the industry, and would far outweigh any benefits gained from withholding cures to maintain prophylactic sales now.So no, I don't think the major companies are sitting on the cures to keep people sick so they can make money off them. There's more money to be made keeping them alive to old age, and then getting steady money off them.

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