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Another thought would be to give the government the option to purchase drug patents from industry at some fixed multiplier of research costs and profits during the lifespan of the patent. That way if the public thought that it was truly in the public good for a drug to be available, people could campaign on the promise of purchasing certain patents.

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Strictly speaking, we have that option - the multiplier of profits, &c., is just a matter of what the market will bear, however.

I'm talking about more formalized than that. For example, suppose that we had a model that would typically return double what a drug would (modelling for inflation and opportunity cost), but that the pharmaceutical company was obligated to sell the patent at that price. Furthermore, suppose that this model was tweaked to generally return 20% more to the pharma company than holding the drug for the length of the patent.

Now the voting public could say that a drug was important enough that it should be funded via tax dollars.

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