Shorten or remove the patent benefits awarded to new drugs, and the calculus changes dramatically.
People want cheap, people want safe, people want well qualified individuals pursuing these advances. What people don't want is higher taxes to enable government funding for this research, and would rather have private investors pick up the tab. And then they scoff at high medicine prices. I'm sure there's some corruption and paper pushing waste going on, but fixing that is not going to remove the need for costly triple blind studies that span years, only to result in failure the vast majority of the time.
That's the cost of good science, and if society wants the fruits, they need to pay for it.
The FDA has extremely long review cycles. To say that this could be not be improved, while still keeping the same standards (or even better ones) is unlikely. Anyway, I don't think it's likely that we will see anyone touching the patent system anytime soon, so it's merely a thought exercise at this stage.
Who sets the rate then? Regulation means government, which will be massively lobbied for increasing licensing fees in the favor of the industry. If you want to shake things a little better to massively decrease the patent period instead, since it makes everything way too slow.