Clarification on "luxury diseases"

[sethisalive]

I guess I should have said that the R&D itself for such high-level, "heroic" diseases is a luxury good---not the secondary goods produced from the R&D. R&D can be thought of as a public luxury good with an intrinsic current and future value in and of itself. The secondary goods produced from the R&D have their own values once they are launched into market, and their prices are quite high due to high R&D costs and oligopolistic-tendencies of their producers. For the US, this R&D is a luxury good. That's what I meant to say. Once the secondary good(s) are released to market, they situationally become necessary goods for a certain number of individuals who can employ them to save their lives or livelihoods. I'm trying to talk about a domestic market in the context of global markets, which isn't my forte: microeconomics, please ;) Thanks to queueball  for pointing this out.

I'm still sorting through this complex set of issues in my head, hope this makes sense.