I wasn't aware we subsidized Walgreen's, Rite-Aid or CVS. That said, ending our paying for the R&D of the pharmaceutical companies while other countries don't is something we need to address and have for a long time.
CVS at least is. I work for a CVS branch that is funded by the government.
And to answer the question, if the R&D isn't subsidized, we'll just end up paying for it some other way. Either through when Medicare/Medicaid pays over a $1000/pill for new drugs because that's the only way the company can possibly make a profit before generics hit the market and undercut it, or in subsidizing insurance companies to do the same thing. This is a sector of the economy where the old mantra of "let the free market take care of it!" simply won't work, unless patent laws are changed drastically, in which case there would be a far bigger threat from the Martin Shkrelis of the world.
Are you referring to a physical CVS pharmacy location, or to Caremark, the pharmacy benefit management company that CVS owns and that provides PBM to some federal health insurance programs?
CVS is one of the biggest government contractors because it provides PBM to Medicare and the DoD. McKesson is another PBM with a lot of government contracts.
The big problem with pharmaceutical research is that there's been an "innovation plateau" of sorts in recent decades. Most of the "paradigm-shifting" drugs were discovered before any of us were even born and the stuff that came later was largely aimed at accomplishing the same stuff existing drugs already do but with "greater efficacy" (like fewer side effects or the ability to use smaller doses).
If you're a profit-seeking firm, your incentives are different. From a societal perspective, it makes more sense to try to find treatments and cures for conditions that currently have none. But that's really expensive to do and has a long time horizon. If your goal is to make money, you'll try to develop drugs that are similar to existing ones (so that there's not a lot of R&D costs) but different enough that you can patent them and market them as "new." Even that's not enough lately and you see a lot of drug companies developing strategic partnerships so they can share R&D costs with other companies.
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