Big Pharma never actually cures anyone

As an aside, my other impression with Big Pharma is that the tend to spend virtually ALL their R&D on products that don't actually cure anything, but rather, put the user on an continuous dose program (think Lipitor, etc). While drugs like Lipitor may actually help out quite a bit, they really seem to be treating the symptoms and not the underlying disease. So there is actually a negative incentive to actually do research into a drug that might cure the underlying disease (almost an inventors dilemma). For diseases that actually could be cured, there's zero non-govt/university research in it because there IS NO MONEY IN IT.

At which point, it becomes obvious that Big Pharma has zero incentive to actually cure anyone of anything. So at this point, it's pretty clear to me that anything Big Pharma says about patents and how much they spend on IR&D is totally irrelevant and frankly, disingenuous.