Actually, that's demonstrably not true.
There is no value judgement on certain medications that have been available for YEARS going up in price 75 fold.
Take gout medication. It used to cost .10 a pill. Now it is $7.50 a pill. What changed? A company bought the patent and lobbied the FDA to reclassify the drug. Now one company cornered the market it on it. Yes, they had to do some testing and yes, it cost them money. Their cost to manufacture did not change. This is the very definition of overpriced.
Epi-pens and Insulin are similar. Yes, there is a newish version of Insulin but that has been around nearly 20 years at this point.
Price controls are a bad idea. Allowing companies to corner the market on life saving drugs and set their own prices wildly out of proportion to their cost is also a bad idea.
It's probably because the patent protection on the $7.50 drug will expire before a competing treatment gets approved.
There are clearly all kinds of problems with the way this whole industry works.
If it's a "life saving drug," then it seems to me that it SHOULD be worth a lot. Am I missing something?
My understanding is that in many cases, the taxpayer-supported NIH does a lot of the research that makes those drugs possible in the first place, and that basically pharmaceutical companies are marketing companies.