You'll have a hard time selling a plan like that to anyone even slightly right leaning - think about it politically for a second. The government decides what drug development gets priority? Remember the death panels talk from a few years ago?
It's viable, but involves a lot of trust in government, so much that even as a fairly left-leaning person myself I'd have to think twice about it.
This might become necessary if we're to avoid an antibiotic crisis. Bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics at a greater rate than antibiotics are being developed. The problem isn't that we've tapped out what antibiotics can do, but rather that drug companies have little to no interest in developing antibiotics because there's very little money in it. Antibiotics are un-sexy drugs that don't make for good marketing campaigns.
Ultimately, if we want to continue to have effective antibiotics, a large entity with no profit motive, nigh infinite money, and a monopoly on force (i.e. the government) will have to get involved.
Establish strict price controls, ban drug patents, and make production volume guarantees a hard condition of receiving federal drug discovery money. And the money should be large enough to be worth it. Ideally, 90%+ of a drug company's income should be from federal contracts and not from sales.
And if that turns out to not be feasible, just nationalize them. The federal government can hire drug-discovery chemists and manufacture the drugs themselves.