The US Government could just start making drugs like insulin and devices like the epipen as a solution to price spikes

The following is a comment I posted in response to the above Richard Wolff video essay:

There is a third way of lowering drug prices: make it ourselves.  By 'ourselves' I mean the US Government owning and operating the means of production of medical drugs and medical devices and distributing those products according to need.  The Government Printing Office has for decades manufactured and sold their own published products.  So there is precedent there and if anyone wants to they can go to their website and browse and maybe buy one of their books:

If they can own the means of production for one type of product, books and other publications, why can't the US Government also own the means of production for other types of products; namely medicines and medical devices?  I think they can and should start to manufacture drugs and medical devices -- especially those products that have fallen outside of patent protection.  And the two products that have gotten the most press recently for price spikes are outside of patent protection; insulin and epipen type devices.

But even for those products that are under patent protection the government should intervene and manufacture those products if the patent owner refuses to lower the price to a much more reasonable level.  The drug company may balk at the idea and complain that they wont be motivated to invest in research if they think the government might preempt any patent rights they might gain from a newly developed medicine -- We can respond that if that is the result then the government can start doing all the research, but doing it for the right reasons; patient health rather than profitability and shareholder value.  Because as it currently stands, the only reason drug companies develop any drug is if and only if they think it will be profitable -- and meanwhile much of the rest of society keeps working under the unsafe assumption that what is best for Big Pharma is also going to be best for patients.

I've written Senator Klobuchar a couple times with my suggestion and she just replies with her explaining her proposed solutions.  One of the main solutions she wants to enact is a bill she introduced that would make it quicker and easier to get generics onto the market and let competition drive down the prices.  My response is that, for one thing, there is nothing mutually exclusive about trying to achieve both my idea and her idea simultaneously.  For another thing, her generics to the market idea seems like just another futile attempt to depend on free enterprise and capitalism to solve are most pressing problems even though a non-capitalist solution is staring at her straight in the face.  I keep thinking about  the movie Jurassic Park near the ending (I'm assuming anyone reading this has seen the movie and thus doesn't need a spoiler alert)  where the park visionary Hammond, even after all the damage and carnage wrought by the dinosaurs, instead of giving up, still is trying desperately to come  up with a way to make it work.  Now, even amidst the aftermath of all the carnage wrought by the involvement of predatory capitalist sharts in the field of medicine, Klobuchar is still trying to figure out ways leave our medical well being in the jaws of those sharks without us getting hurt.  I think it is time to give up on that route and realize that under the exigent circumstances, we need to get started as soon as possible manufacturing and distributing, according to need, those medicines and medical devices.