Monetary Evil: Curing People Of Deadly Diseases Bad For Revenue, Says Goldman Sachs

An example of how we seem to priortize making money over all else, screw morality, Goldman Sachs is warning companies not to come up with cures for deadly diseases, because that's not a good moneymaking business model.

As CNBC and other news outlets report, Goldman Sachs analysts, in a report called "The Genome Revolution" asked "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"

The answer to Goldman Sachs, apparently, is no.

Here's an excerpt from the report: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.......While the proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

In other words, better to let people die slow, painful deaths while draining their bank accounts with expensive treatments, than just partly draining their bank accounts while allowing people to go on living.

Goldman Sachs cites a hepatitis C treatment from Gilean Sciences, which achieves a cure rate of more than 90 percent. The company came out with a handy dandy new Hep C cure whose sales peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015. Those profits have been falling ever since, because so many people have been cured of the disease that there's not as many remaining left to treat.

Also, if you don't have hepatitis C, you're not going to transmit it to other people, which is bad for business. Says the Goldman Sachs report: "In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines"

Moral of the story, in Goldman Sachs world: Make sure Hep C is chronic, so people keep paying for treatments, and make sure it spreads to other people, keeping the revenue stream alive, even as people die and/or go bankrupt.

It also turns out that non-infectious diseases like cancer are a bit more profitable because there's always going to be people coming down with cancer. It's not an infectious disease, so "the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise."

The takeaway here is that since big financial companies like Goldman Sachs seem to be our overlords these days, scientists should stop finding cures for diseases, especially genetic cures that have the potential of stopping a disease via one major innoculation.

Many American businesses depend on millions of people suffering from chronic, incurable, expensive diseases, and you commie scientists and doctors better not interfere with that business model!