You might be right to a certain extent, but keep in mind just how expensive trials are. Many millions sometimes even into the 10s of millions of dollars for a single trial depending on the indication. That's a ton of money. For reference, an RO1 grant from the NIH (the bread and butter grant for biology research in the US) is about $250-$500K a year for one lab. That means for the price of one phase 3 trial you could fund 20 labs looking into how diseases work.
There are plenty of private sector actors that will fund the phase 3 trial, very few that will fund the basic science. So your choices are:
1.) Cut funding for basic research, move the money to clinical development
2.) Increase funding for research overall, but then where does the money come from?
In the case of 2, you'd probably have to boost funding a lot to match the private sector spending. Pfizer spends $8B/year or so on R&D. The NIH budget is $40B. So to match a single pharma's total R&D budget (granted much of that isn't strictly clinical trials, but the entire drug development process), you'd have to increase NIH's budget by 20-25%.
There are always trade-offs, and these are hard ones to make. Perhaps they should be tilted more toward the government, but the numbers are really large, so it's good to understand them before making a conclusion.
I won’t defend the marketing very much, I think there’s a lot wrong in pharma marketing. The only (very slight) defense I’d make is that marketing when done well brings in more resources than it costs and helps the broader org. That said, it’s hard to know and it’s a difficult area morally.
There are plenty of private sector actors that will fund the phase 3 trial, very few that will fund the basic science. So your choices are:
1.) Cut funding for basic research, move the money to clinical development
2.) Increase funding for research overall, but then where does the money come from?
In the case of 2, you'd probably have to boost funding a lot to match the private sector spending. Pfizer spends $8B/year or so on R&D. The NIH budget is $40B. So to match a single pharma's total R&D budget (granted much of that isn't strictly clinical trials, but the entire drug development process), you'd have to increase NIH's budget by 20-25%.
There are always trade-offs, and these are hard ones to make. Perhaps they should be tilted more toward the government, but the numbers are really large, so it's good to understand them before making a conclusion.