Yes, although the cost bottleneck isn't the primary research to find drug candidates, but the clinical trials needed to see which of the hundred drug candidates i) works and ii) is safe. And public funding of medical research is nowhere near what would be necessary to fund current levels of clinical research, let alone expand to meet the enormous unmet demand. For instance, UK government medical research funding is significantly less than £1bn, and estimates are the the cost of clinical trials to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of just one drug costs £0.2-1bn. So the UK could divert all pure and early-stage research and develop only 1-5 drugs each year.

Agree about marketing, I think most people agree the purpose of the pharma industry is finding objective treatments for objective diseases, and not generating spurious demand. I think we could potentially optimize strongly for the first part if we heavily restricted the latter part.