This is an example of an arbitrage opportunity. It's a necessary evil of capitalism, and unfortunately, our government has decided that free market capitalism is an appropriate system to use for health care.<p>Arbitrage can be explained as thus: you have an opportunity to buy $1 for $0.75. How many dollars do you buy? The correct answer is "all of them". In this case, a drug had a sale price of $3 and a market value of $150 per pill (established by its competitor), so an investor basically purchased "all of them" and resold them at a higher price.<p>If your goal is maximum economic efficiency, arbitrage is necessary. It allows companies to make decisions with the goal of maximizing profit (i.e. maximum economic efficiency) in moral hazard situations: if something is legal but morally dubious, if they don't do it, someone else will force them to. This is necessary because every individual has a slightly different idea of what is "right" and what is "wrong". Businesses don't have morals because they're not people. They are amoral, and arbitrage is the means by which that amorality is maintained. If a person wishes to exercise their moral calculus, they are free to do so when making investment decisions.<p>I don't believe that to be the case with healthcare. In my opinion, healthcare is a sector that really shouldn't operate along capitalist principles because the goal of a national healthcare system should not be to maximize economic efficiency: it should be to maximize the health and well-being of its citizens. I know that's hard to quantify, but it's certainly not quantified by the dollars spent on health care. IMO government price controls on healthcare are the only solution to the problem. I don't know how that gets implemented, but I do know that the pendulum needs to swing towards socialized medicine if we expect things to get better.