Ideally, the government should just straight-up pay companies to do drug discovery using something similar to cost-plus defense contracts (and establish DCAA-style auditing practices to keep them honest).
Establish strict price controls, ban drug patents, and make production volume guarantees a hard condition of receiving federal drug discovery money. And the money should be large enough to be worth it. Ideally, 90%+ of a drug company's income should be from federal contracts and not from sales.
And if that turns out to not be feasible, just nationalize them. The federal government can hire drug-discovery chemists and manufacture the drugs themselves.
Establish strict price controls, ban drug patents, and make production volume guarantees a hard condition of receiving federal drug discovery money. And the money should be large enough to be worth it. Ideally, 90%+ of a drug company's income should be from federal contracts and not from sales.
And if that turns out to not be feasible, just nationalize them. The federal government can hire drug-discovery chemists and manufacture the drugs themselves.