That sounds like a lot. It is, to a degree. Do you think they should fund this treatment for free for 2000 people? Because 600,000 people die from cancer every year. Just in the US.
Insurance companies? Anthem made about a billion. State Farm lost $71M. The list goes on.
Hospitals are doing far worse.
You can cut researcher salaries; great, you just impacted the people who are literally doing the research to save peoples' lives. You can cut executive salaries; they mostly get paid in stock anyway, and its not like their job isn't important. You can rely on public research; uh oh, the public just elected Mr. Donald, who called the NHS "broken". #Defunded.
I hate the expediency of some people. Let's look for an easy answer to this problem: Drug companies are greedy! Or... How about this: drug research is fucking difficult, which makes it very expensive. And also: humans are designed to die. There are a billion things on this planet that can kill us, and quite often when drug companies fix one of them, those little asshole bacteria get three times stronger and fight back, or humans discover a new thing to smoke or drink that gives them cancer.
And then the same people who just finished a large milkshake from McDonalds hop online or go to a protest and yell that drugs are too expensive.