The problem with trying to cure most diseases is it's hard, not unprofitable. Most drugs are closer to replacing the oil early which can prolong the life of an engine, it's not as good as a refit but it's a lot simpler. Take diabetes, a cure requires you to fix any of a huge number of possible breakdowns in a wide range of systems; treatment requires administering a single chemical based on glucose levels. Which do you think is harder? Shure, in 100 years we might be able to repair someone’s DNA with minimal side effects based on what’s broken but that’s a long way off.

PS: People talk about drug companies funding research, but mostly they just do refinements and late stage clinical trials. They have minimal impact on the type of research that actually discovers how things work or the basic ideas for how to fix things and if a cure for a major ailment was possible they would jump on even a modest cash cow.

Granted, insulin is a great solution that works well enough to save a lot of pain, and diabetes is a complex condition. I'm not saying maintenance doses are always wrong - nothing is ever always wrong. I'm saying maintenance doses are profitable, and there's little incentive to look farther, unless you're just one of those nuts who can't help it. The nuts end up dragging the rest of us along, usually - so in the end, we end up muddling through. And you clearly can't make it a policy to fund all the nuts, because most of them are, well, they're nuts.

I remain convinced that funds could be allocated somewhat better. In this as in so very many other things.