Would you rather be paid $10K today all at once or $83 a month for 10 years?

The industry would just recapitulate the rest of the country: all of the profit would go to the top 0.1%. On average it would do great :)

At that point company B has made more money than all of the treatment manufacturers were making combined. It set a high price for its cure, everyone bought the cure. If the disease was Diabetes, they grossed 2 trillion dollars, easy. At that point B could just buy Google or a medium size country if they still felt like they needed something to do.

But the cure is worth much more money than the treatment. It's like saying Yahoo should buy Google to shelve the competition.

Why would A get to market first? B would get much more love from the FDA: breakthrough status and accelerated approval. Plus since it's a cure (only taken once, not forever) it wouldn't have to jump over as many hoops to prove that it is safe. All else being equal, B would get to market months or years ahead of A.

Let me ask you this - You're a pharma with two different Diabetes drugs. They've both made it through phase II clinical trials and have the same side effect/risk profiles. Now you have to pick one to push forward.

Drug A, a cure. Drug B, treatment Time til profit: Since it offers benefits far above a treatment, the cure gets gets a breakthrough therapy designation and accelerated approval from the FDA review panel, leading it to be approved months or years earlier than the treatment. Once in the market, the cure earns all of its revenue FAST. Everyone takes it as soon as they can get it. The treatment takes longer to approve, slowly pulls in market share, and slowly earns revenue over a decade until generic competition kills the margin. Competition: A cure for diabetes would displace all existing treatments as fast as it could be manufactured. It wouldn't even face competition from "me too" cures - by the time they came out every existing diabetic with insurance has already been cured, so you're only fighting over new cases. A treatment would face stiff competition from all of the existing drugs - and thus have huge marketing costs. The situation would only get worse as "me too" therapies showed up a few years later. And marketing costs for the cure would be limiting to hitting "send" on the press releases. Price: Insurance companies wouldn't compare the cost of a cure to the cost of a decade of diabetes drugs, they would compare it to the cost of a decade of diabetes care: hospitalizations, diagnostics, office visits, everything. A pharma could price a cure at $100K and insurance companies would actually save money.

Basically, A good new Diabetes treatment would make a shit ton of money. But by the time it made it to market a cure would have already made its manufacturer the richest company in the world, and probably over 2 trillion dollars in revenue ($25k per dose x 50 million diabetics in the US and the EU) within 5 years.

They take a pretty narrow view of "we". Once you get past the basic science phase of identifying the cause, the vast majority of funding and FTEs goes to researching treatments. Even though cures would be much more profitable for most diseases, it is very rare for cures to be attainable.

That's great for simple stories. But this further kills the incentive to follow long, complicated stories that take months of investigation of multiple sources. Like say, most government corruption investigations. Still it would be a fair rule, unlike Scott Walker trying to carve out FOIA exemptions to hide embarrassing and potentially corrupt practices.

This argument reminds me of a few years ago when private weather forecasters were trying to kill off the National Weather Service's websites and public forecasts so that they wouldn't have public competition when presenting NWS data and analysis.

Is the name of the requester also going to be published, or just the documents requested?

For short haul flights many folks will accept folding, thinly padded seats. For long haul flights this will be a great way to force people to "upgrade" to the old, worn, traditional seats without legroom in the front half of the cabin for an extra $35 each. Heads airlines win, tails passengers lose.

"the Net treats advertising as damage and routes around it"

Actually 7-8 is optimal. More or less than that is associated with increases in all-cause mortality.

FTA: This bubble has been building for less than 1 year, stocks are still up 83% over last year, most of the companies with solid reputations trade on indexes in other countries instead of China. On it's own this correction might wipe out 1 year of market gains, but as mentioned in comments below: if it combines with real estate bubble and the level of debt things could get messy.

For supporting elderly relatives: Macs are great. More recipes, fewer puzzles.