The government tends not to buy companies because it has an unfair advantage: the government can just print an extra $11B and acquire companies for basically no

The government tends not to buy companies because it has an unfair advantage: the government can just print an extra $11B and acquire companies for basically nothing. But once you start doing buying private companies, you have to actually RUN those companies. The government isn't really very good at that. But the US government is also very bad at negotiating pharmaceutical pricing. The flip side is that most other developed countries in Europe are good at it. So in order to keep their margins and meet financial targets, pharma companies just raise prices on their US customers to subsidize the thinner margins that European governments pay for drugs. It's hard to reform this because the pharma lobby is quite powerful and makes a lot of money off the status quo.