Just give them health insurance.
See, here's the thing-- that doesn't help anything. It might feel like it helps on an individual level, but all you're doing is obfuscating the costs and passing them on to Big Pharma's partner-in-crime, the insurance industry.
Do you recall what happened when the ACA passed? At first it seemed pretty nice, that 20 million uninsured Americans were now getting insurance. It was shit insurance, sure (the Bronze plan still holds you for $12,500 out of pocket, so if you're making little enough money that the vouchers cover it, you're still fucked), but almost instantly everybody's insurance began to rise. Within a few years people were expected to pay double or even triple what they had paid before the passing of the ACA. For covering families, it could cost more than your monthly mortgage just to have an insurance plan that, god willing, the vast majority of people never actually use over the course of a regular year.
Businesses with a certain number of full-time employees were forced to pay skyrocketing health insurance for
all of them, which threatened to bankrupt swathes of small businesses. The workaround for this was to either fire people (since they could no longer be sustained) or cut hours (which meant they were no longer 'full time' and therefore did not qualify for government-mandated private-business-paid health insurance). People lost jobs and lost hours in the wake of businesses just trying to keep their heads above the water. Larger businesses could, of course, eat the cost (and larger businesses typically already provided health insurance, although many of those health insurance policies had to be expanded because of the demands of the ACA, such as every female employee having to pay for maternity insurance... even if they were too old to have children, infertile, or just plain weren't interested. That's what you get for having a uterus!), but small businesses (and their employees) couldn't handle it.
As prices continued to soar, suddenly it cost five- or six-hundred dollars just to cover two people under one plan. You wanted to cover a family? Expect to pay four digits a month. And these were costs for the Bronze-level ACA package which-- which, because you're looking at covering multiple people, now holds you accountable for $24,000 out-of-pocket. If you wanted to adhere to the government mandate, you were going to be losing huge chunks of your income every month for the privilege of still paying five figures in the event that the worst happened.
For those twenty million people who were now insured, thirty million others lost theirs. Those who already had it were forced to cut back on all other expenses just to cover the costs-- it wasn't hard to find a story about somebody who had to decide whether health insurance or food was more important. And if you didn't pay during the year, here comes your yearly fine.
Did it help people? Yes, it did. But socialized medicine and mandated insurance are a band-aid applied to a missing arm. The issue is much broader than 'just give them health insurance'. If you can't bring the back-end costs down, you're just shifting the financial demand from one venue to another. The revenue is still going to reach the pharmaceutical manufacturers, and since the costs are now completely obfuscated they suddenly have the opportunity to charge
even more because hey, who's going to notice? And that's only going to wind up benefiting distributors and insurance companies because they all make back-end deals to ensure that everybody walks away with pockets lined.
Meanwhile, regular people are bled dry.
The solution isn't to just give people 'free' things and expect them to be complacent, it's to figure out why things are the way they are and take steps to fix them. There are a lot of factors about why drug costs are so high-- having to pay for freeloaders on the system, having the manufacturers almost solely responsible for setting price points, having retail outlets need to do additional markup to break even, the fact that the US is subsidizing socialized medicine in dozens of other countries... and I'm sure there are many, many other factors that I'm not aware of. You fix these factors and the cost of medicine plummets.