Generics do work to lower prices, at least over time. I've been on two medications that, when started, their patents were about to expire. They still cost a small fortune, $700 to $1000/month on retail cost without insurance. Over the course of about 6 years, the generics were introduced and were also initially very expensive, but the competition gradually lowered prices and they're now sub-$100/month for the generic, and maybe 3x that for the Brand name (still expensive for the brand, but significantly cheaper).

The problem with the astronomically escalating drug prices tends to be those where there's a bottleneck of a single producer. Two manufactures would help this, and syprine is an excellent example:

According to NYTimes [0] Syprine was about $21k when Teva introduced a generic, which was priced around $18k. In the roughly 2 years since though, the price has dropped significantly down to about $11k [1]

I suspect it will continue to drop as the two manufacturers gradually undercut each other over & over again. It's a slow process, and it could be much, much better, but it is one avenue of attack against these abusive pricing tactics.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/health/valeant-drug-price...

[1] https://www.goodrx.com/syprine