Generally, when massive price oddities become commonplace, it's evidence of government distortions of free market operation. Trying to blame it on 'rogue' CEOs is an exercise in futility.
* the market in the United States is so small, that there is a single manufacturer
* Generic drug manufacturers try to come in the market, the brand-name holder has made it extremely hard for them to do equivalence testing by making the drug available only through a restricted channel that excludes them.
* Even if them manage to get the drug to the market, the brand-name manufacturer can lower prices temporarily, ensuring they exit.
* The same manufacturer can have doctors prescribe the expensive brand-name versions of the drug by buying them off.
Instead of leaving patients in the hands of such natural or almost natural monopolies, the government can fix this situation in a variety of ways - price ceilings, subsidies, even government production of drugs for rare diseases.
You can argue that, some regulation somewhere has given these companies a monopoly, but without any regulation, there would be no market to speak of - the off-NDA drug market isn't one I and assume most patients trust.
See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Sam Peltzman.
I'd think they should require cooperation with the equivalence studies, and possibly foot (part of?) the bill for those studies. Try to minimize the downsides of their (overall important and helpful, if perhaps taken a bit too far) regulations that cause the problem.
Price ceilings for anything with a government-granted monopoly would also probably be good, but that's... not exactly the issue here, since the drugs in question have gone off-patent.
Poor people end up taking that increase in life expectancy and just wasting it on walking and sitting on the bus because it's so expensive to operate a vehicle here in Canada.
It's your mother's place to tell you to wear your seatbelt, not the government's.
In this case, not even due to a patent, but because you can't sell a generic without lengthy, costly FDA approval.
Essentially the government is telling sick people, "you can't take this generic daraprim from India because we haven't approved it, so pay Martin Shkreli $750 a pill or fuck off and die".
It's asinine and it's 100% the government's fault this is happening. If Martin Shkreli hadn't done it, someone else would have.
Drugs are not comparable, because there's typically only a handful of drugs that are effective for a given condition, and often just one.
The inexpensive prices for drugs cited in the article happened before the US government got heavily involved with running the health care industry. Maybe that's a coincidence, but I doubt it.
The end of famine in America happened around 1800, as the free market and the industrial revolution fixed that problem. Famine persists in other areas that insist on collectivized farms or have other problems that prevent free market agriculture, such as warfare.
Even the Soviet Union had to import wheat from Kansas, and allowed farmers to farm their own plots and sell the results, because the collectivized farms could not produce enough.