Put on one side whether this is actually genuien and important. The thing that leaps out from that article is how skewed the drug development rocess is by its being run by the drug comoanies.

This means that the bottom line is always how much money can be made by marketing the drugs, rather than how much benefit (including financial benefit) there is to society by having them available.

This means, to take an extreme example, that developing a one-off drug which actually cured a condition and which could be produced cheaply, would be financially disastrous, whereas a drug which needed to be taken continually to hold that condition at bay would be highly profitable.

In contrast in a drug development system linked in to the National Health Service (or equivalent), the financial pressures would be reversed. The priority would be drugs that cured and could then cease to be taken rather than drugs that need to be taken for a long time.