Without the right to exclusively profit from the final product, are pharmaceutical companies gonna invest all the resources and engage in all the bureaucracy-navigation it takes to develop a new drug?
Per recent congressional testimony, virtually all drugs are developed with NIH (federal) funding. So the first order of business in fixing this problem is dispelling the notion that there is such a thing as a "market" for pharmaceuticals. There is not. Government money is present quite literally from the very first step.
Coincidentally, dispelling false notions of the existence of "free markets" is the first step to solving a lot of other economic problems as well.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/01/re...
The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.
None of this has anything to do with the fact that the government is footing this bill.
> The drug companies do a lot of R&D to validate the ideas of drug discovery teams and to test for side effects. They spend incredible amounts of money on this, much more than the labs that initially proposed the drug.
Yeah, they do a lot of that... with taxpayer money.