If I might scroll back up to the discussion of Big Pharma. Between 1987 and 2010, my work was writing company annual reports and I worked on a lot, in all sorts of industries, one of them being pharmaceuticals. It takes on average the examination of many thousand compounds (animal, vegetable and mineral) to identify ONE that might hold some potential as a treatment; it will be five to eight years in the lab before that promise is proven; 95% of everything tested out will be discarded. It will then take longer still, in animal trials, before the compound is deemed sufficiently safe to be trialled on humans, initially with a small group of terminally ill folk who are out of options. If they show improvement and the side-effects are within defined parameters, then the pharmaceutical company will go into phase 2 clinical trials of a much larger (thousands of participants) of a double-blind programme over a period of months or years. If those are equally good, then the company will work out how the drug can be manufactured in prescribable quantities. At some stage, a patent will have been applied for but the art comes in not applying too soon, because the patent only gives 10/15 years of exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from sales before the patent expires and any other drug company, which has not spent a penny of the £20+ million development costs (1990s figures -- this is my historic stuff, so won't bear forensic scrutiny) can make a cheap generic version, which is mostly what the NHS buys unless there is no choice. It also has to be marketed so doctors know about it, and that costs bundles too. And sometimes you'll discover a medication that only has value to poor people who can't pay for it. There is a drug called Mectizan (made by Merck) which prevents blindness resulting from the bites of a fly in parts of Africa. It wasn't what it was developed for, but they still make it AFAIK, because it's important. So big drug companies also need to support their 'orphan' drugs too.
It costs a pharmaceutical company far far more to bring one new drug into safe use than you would believe and the failure rate is triple that in creative industries. One hit movie or a music act pays for thousands of failures, also-rans and straight to video dogs. (I also worked on the shareholder reports for a global entertainment organisation for several years). When a company's management is good at picking winners, their shares soar but too many failures and out the door they go. Hence the high salaries and the close attention the investment analysts take in who's hot and who's not.
Lecture over, except to say that when you understand this, it explains why the focus is always on drugs to treat the problems of well-off populations of chronically (not terminally) ill people. And why savaging big pharma will do more harm than good. Ditto for most companies with traded shares.
What else are our pension funds going to invest in, other than corporate equities and debt securities, if they are going to meet liabilities that won't be paid out until retirement, perhaps 40 or 50 years away? Pension funds can't stick it in the building society at 0.115% if they are going to grow and beat inflation. Sorry to bang on.