WELL, YES: Competition Works Best to Control Drug Prices.

Companies are indeed greedy, but they are always greedy — it’s a constant, like the speed of light. You don’t see prices suddenly popping up because of a constant. You see prices suddenly popping up because something has changed.

And what might that something be? One thing that changed is that nine years ago, Mylan bought the rights to make the device. And Mylan decided to raise prices.

But that’s not quite enough of an answer. Companies often decide they’d like to raise prices. And yet, we rarely see markets where prices shoot up by a factor of five when there’s been little change in the underlying costs.

However, those markets have something that the market for EpiPens lacks: competition. People trying to produce a generic version of the EpiPen are held back by the difficulties of getting approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Obviously, the solution is more bureaucracy.