This has imposed a far bigger burden on health spending than Shkreli's escapades, making it much harder for Americans to pay for drugs they need. Even if they're insured, most people are paying out big sums in co-payments and deductibles.
Not to mention the impact on private insurers, Medicare, state Medicaid, prisons and the Veterans Health Administration.
And the prices of new drugs are sky-high. Pfizer's new one to treat advanced breast cancer costs $9,850 a month.
According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, that price isn't based on manufacturing or research costs.
Instead, Pfizer set the price as high as possible without pushing doctors and insurers toward alternative drugs.
But don't all profit-maximizing firms set prices as high as they can without pushing customers toward alternatives?
Unlike most other countries, the United States doesn't control drug prices. It leaves pricing up to the market.
Which enables drug companies to charge as much as the market will bear.
So what, exactly, did Martin Shkreli do wrong, by the standards of today's capitalism?
He played the same game many others are playing on Wall Street and in corporate suites. He was just more audacious about it.
It's easy to go after bad guys, much harder to go after bad systems.
Hedge fund managers, for example, make big gains from trading on insider information. That robs small investors who aren't privy to the information.
But it's not illegal unless a trader knows the leaker was compensated -- a looser standard than in any other advanced country.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune off average Americans, who are paying more for the drugs they need than the citizens of any other advanced country.
That's largely because Big Pharma has wielded its political influence to avoid cost controls, to ban Medicare from using its bargaining clout to negotiate lower prices, and to allow drug companies to pay the makers of generic drugs to delay their cheaper versions.
Shkreli may be a rotten apple. But hedge funds and the pharmaceutical industry are two rotten systems that are costing Americans a bundle.
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