This reduces the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to complete the testing process  Testing new drugs is a very expensive process, in 2000 the average cost was estimated at around 86 million for the large scale phase III tests1 however this is contested and it could be much higher it represents 40% of pharmaceutical companies R&amp;D expenditures, which since a recent estimated the development cost of a drug can be up to $5.8billion (due to including failures) the cost of trials would in some cases then be $2billion,2 which is currently funded by pharmaceutical companies. They fund these tests because it is either impossible, very difficult or very risky to access large markets before testing has been completed (e.g. in the USA companies are only allowed to sell new drugs “off-study”, i.e. during trials, at cost3)  If you allow all terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs, you reduce the incentive for companies to continue testing their products: they will have access to a large market prior to the completion of testing, and will therefore have no incentive to complete trials, which are expensive and risk finding the product ineffective.  1 DiMasi, Joseph A. et al., ‘The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs’, Journal of Health Economics, Vol.22, 2003, pp.151-185, p.162   2 Roy, Avik S. A., ‘Stifling New Cures: The True Cost of Lengthy Clinical Drug Trials’, Project FDA Report, No. 5, April 2012,   3 Schüklenk, Udo, and Lowry, Christopher, ‘Terminal illness and access to Phase 1 experimental agents, surgeries and devices: reviewing the ethical arguments’, British Medical Bulletin, Vol.89, 2009, pp.7-22,