Humans are now still faced with many presently incurable health problems, investing in discovering new medicines and effective treatments is of paramount importance. However, opinions are divided on whether such investment should come from the private sector or the government. I believe that both private medical companies and the state should pay for healthcare research because they both benefit from it.
Firstly, private businesses benefit from their subsidies for medical research, in financial terms. For example, if they find an effective treatment to curb debilitating effects of, say, drug withdrawal, or new contraception methods that do not have side effects, they can make billions of dollars. The potential financial gain surely encourages medical companies to expend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on laboratory equipment leading medical scientists. We see this in the way pharmaceutical companies around the world are racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19 in the hope that they could make a name for themselves and reap the financial rewards.
The government, on the other hand, has the obligation to ensure public health, and subsidizing research in the healthcare sector is a way to fulfill it. Furthermore, a healthy population is surely more productive, which is a clear precursor to economic growth and an a priori justification for the call for an increase in state spending on healthcare research. Not only this, if there are fewer people suffering from debilitating health problems, the government can cut back on subsidies for their treatments. Such savings could be reallocated to other much needed areas such as education and infrastructure.
In conclusion, both the private sector and the government should invest in medical studies because they benefit a great deal from such investment.