That makes zero sense to me.

If you could cure it, you could charge more than treatment - because it's more valuable to the person getting cured. If you had cancer with a 5 year expected survival rate, would you pick (arbitrary round numbers)

$10,000 per year in treatment to manage it but you've still got cancer.

$55,000 paid over 5 years, $5000 more than you would pay to just manage it, but you also don't have cancer any more.

Assuming that you can charge whatever number you want. Realistically however you will have to negotiate with insurances and sometimes governments about the price of things. The second group is particularly tricky, since government make the rules.

Imagine you invent a way to cure cancer and it costs you 10000$ a treatment. How much do you charge the customer? Two times that? Ten? Twenty? At what point is someone going to stop in and force you to sell at a lower price? How long till public opinion turns against you? What if competition forces the price down? There are lot of variables that might lead to you ending up at 10000$ + a few percent profit margin.

Now imagine you have a medication that's 100$ a dosage. You sell it for 120$. That's 84 doses to cover the cost of a cancer treatment. Assuming the same markup on treatment that's 100 doses.

At this point it's the simple question what the company is more likely to get away with: Many small doses with a profit margin that add up? Or one large treatment with a big profit margin?

Right now reality shows that the small doses seem to work better. An example would be insulin. In the US it costs 30$ a dose upwards. Production costs are at less than 10$. [0] That's a 200% markup.

With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?

[0]: https://marketrealist.com/healthcare/cost-to-manufacture-ins...

Then let's think through that with other considerations than the patient would have.

The lower bound is surely the same as long term treatment, right? No player here would choose more expensive treatment that doesn't cure the patient. Insurers get premiums for longer if you live, and governments rely on having a workforce.

If governments act beyond the bounds of negotiating as a large buyer and legislate, have they not already done that for the treatment already? Is there as much to lose as you think?

> With numbers like these, why would you ever cure something?

Because you can charge more. Being cured is better than not being cured. If being ill and getting partially treated cost $100/month, would you honestly not pay $100.01/month forever but be cured?

Your arguments about public opinion and pressure rely people stepping in because your business practices are immoral, but this is what you're already accusing them of without any actual repercussions.

> What if competition forces the price down

If someone has a cure cheaper than your non-cure, frankly you're already fucked as a business. This also means that anyone who isn't the current main supplier has a very obvious reason to release an actual cure because then they'll get all of the business.

For comparison, the last five years money I have paid for a rent are nowhere near the cost of an apartment I’m living in. Both cancer and a lack of room to live in destroys your life.

Assuming free market, the cost of total cure will probably settle on at least 2-5x of an average life expectation times a treatment cost per year, minus some minor operational expenses.

> Assuming free market,

Are you assuming multiple suppliers for that cure or a single supplier?

Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?

In the case where there were multiple suppliers ( with no collusion between them ) - then the price could be driven down to the cost of production, rather than the value that it brings.

So for example food is essential to live - yet it's cheap.

> Very different. In the case of a single supplier - wouldn't it make sense to pay everything you own ( minus what else you need to live ) to survive?

That's assuming you get to negotiate with every customer. If it's one price for everyone then while what you say is true for each person's max (ignoring the complexity of people looking after others, the same logic applies of "everything you can afford") that's different for everyone so the optimal price can vary.

Good point about everyone's optimal price varying.

The solution there is to sell the same thing to different people at differences prices - lots of ways of doing this.

For example America pays lots more for it's pharma drugs than other countries.

You are thinking too narrowly.

Everyone dies of something - you don't save lives, you delay death.

The older people are the more likely they will have multiple chronic things to be treated - diabetes, arthritis etc .

This is one of the challenges that society hasn't quite got to grips with yet - and it's why health care costs are climbing ever upwards.

> Treating an illness is even more profitable than curing it

You have to actually treat it though - if the patient dies, it isn't profitable either. I suppose (all morality aside), the optimal profitability would be in a cure that required an annual installment fee.

Maybe some sort of cure as a service?