The Journal of the American Medical Association has a good paper on how to deal with sociopaths exploiting regulatory arbitrage opportunities to screw people over on generic drug pricing:
Current policy already permits the agency to move up in the queue applications for generic drugs that “could help mitigate or resolve a drug shortage and prevent future shortages.”4 FDA should recognize that addressing monopolistic conditions that give rise to sudden price hikes is a means to “prevent future shortages.”…
FDA should consider temporarily permitting compounding of the drug at issue. Compounding is the creation of medications from individual ingredients under the supervision of a pharmacist but outside of the FDA drug approval process….
A second option is to temporarily permit the importation of drug products reviewed by competent regulatory authorities and approved for sale outside the United States. For example, Glaxo, the original manufacturer of pyrimethamine, sells a version of the drug approved for use in the United Kingdom at less than $1 per tablet. FDA has used similar measures during drug shortages, including a temporary importation in 2012 during a shortage of the key anticancer agent doxorubicin.
If those tools are known to be in the FDA’s tool bag, they should act as a deterrent to most sociopaths who want to create opportunistic and temporary monopolies which can then be used to squeeze the public of every possible penny for a year or more. Instead, the window to squeeze would be a week or two in most cases. And that window is not long enough to compensate for the horrendous press and bad faith reputation the squeezing company now would have acquired.
Steps like this increase competition, improve the public wellbeing and increase social surplus while being extremely anti-current business. They are also steps that can mostly be taken by administrative action when there is a White House that wants to actively bend the cost curve.