America’s healthcare system needs to learn how to delay gratification.

The practice of teaching patience for a more valuable and longer-lasting reward may sound like it has more to do with parenting than medicine. Yet, with recent price controls floated by the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some people will be getting short-term relief from drug costs at the expense of future medical breakthroughs. People who don’t need the drugs selected by CMS in a closed-door assessment may even end up paying more for their medication, while other consumers enjoy discounts.

This attempt to help relieve people of high drug costs may seem admirable, but it is misplaced and could delay potential cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. Medicare price controls limit medical company’s ability to reinvest money into drug development. Of the entire United States’s retail prescription drug spending, Medicare’s share increased to 30% in 2017, up from 18% in 2006. Now, patients on Medicare are the second-highest users of prescription drugs. For this reason, medical companies have no choice but to provide medicine through Medicare. Otherwise, they would risk going out of business.

Yet, companies rely on their profit margin to invest in drug development. By putting a price cap on drugs sold through Medicare, politicians aren’t limiting “price gouging.” Rather, they are hampering innovation within the medical sector.

Companies are already cutting costs in preparation for price controls. Roche, the Swiss drug manufacturer, axed a hemophilia A drug to prepare for the economic impact of price controls, and Alynylam Pharmaceuticals dropped the developmental drug Vutrisiran , a drug used to combat a disease that causes blindness, due to the damage that will be caused by price controls. Eli Lilly also dropped a promising blood cancer drug that it had sunk $40 million into developing simply to cut its financial losses amid projections that price controls could more negatively affect specific types of cancer drugs. AstraZeneca is considering not even launching new cancer drugs to market in the U.S. due to the impact price controls have on their research goals.

When scientists spend years tinkering to find the precise drug to treat cancer, that time spent is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those millions of research and development dollars come from drug sales. The $102.3 billion that companies a part of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America sunk into R&D in 2021 alone would be cut if price controls were to go into effect for Medicare drugs. This could mean new drugs would never make it to market, much less even be developed in the first place.

Without money to sink into medical research and testing for drugs under development, medical companies will be forced to rely on selling one drug and only one drug. This would leave the entire industry vulnerable. One economic shock could spell the end of a company responsible for manufacturing medications for millions of people.

The Biden administration has claimed these price controls will help lower the costs of prescription drugs for the average person. While that is true, the long-term costs of these price controls cannot be overstated. The result will be fewer medicines for people to choose from and no incentive to find cures for rare, genetic, and currently incurable diseases. Those medicines that keep some patients from using them due to side effects will have limited to no options.

Worse still, President Joe Biden’s CMS is not explaining how or why it has chosen the drugs that will be subject to price controls. Depriving future Americans of potentially life-saving drugs is rash, and the administration should at least be transparent about CMS’s decision-making process when it comes to drug pricing.

U.S. medicine companies develop two-thirds of all new medications worldwide. While people pay more for their medicine overall, we also have access to far more medications than other countries. A fraction of new medications that have been introduced in America since 2011 are available in other countries due to their price control schemes.

To make sure America remains the most innovative market in the world, the federal government should be working with the healthcare industry to figure out ways to reduce costs and ensure that companies can still create new drugs to treat diseases.

Roy Mathews is a writer for Young Voices. He is a graduate of Bates College and a 2023 Claremont Institute Publius fellow. He has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and National Review Online.