It's all economics. Most medicines are a binary option, either they cure you, or you die anyway. Either way, you can't sell too many of them.

Maintenance drugs, like diabetes or cholesterol treatments, can be sold to the patient for the rest of his life, they are a real money-maker over the long term, even when the patient is perfectly healthy, not just when the he is sick. Now, of course, I would never say the pharmaceutical industry is putting all its efforts into developing and marketing maintenance meds for healthy people because they are more profitable, but from the point of view of market dynamics, those are precisely the marketing and research programs tham will attract the most corporate support and investment, they are the most profitable.

Today, when many antibiotics are becoming ineffective because of drug-resistant strains of bacteria, doctors complain not too much effort is going into developing new ones because of this very reason: there just ain't that much profit in it, compared to maintenance meds, many of which are often difficult to evaluate because of the long-term nature of the treatment. You just don't clean up financially when you develop an antibiotic (at great expense), which only can be used to treat a handful of people every year suffering from a rare infection. Of course, I am not implying these long-term prescriptions are unneccessary, but there are obviously other pressures besides medicine which encourage their proliferation, as the article points out.

And of course, I am not saying there is an evil boardroom full of villains deliberately endangering lives just to make more money, it's just that the market forces the the system to behave as if that was the case.