It’s called “capitalism”. “Charge what you can get away with”. Works especially well with life-dependent drugs.

Capitalism has no morality...

Go Bernie! But honestly those drug companies are a bunch of crooks, it’s not at all about funding future research it is more about making as much profit as possible.

The trouble is, the legal structure for approving drugs and their manufacture keeps them in power. A couple of large hospitals here banded together and said, we can easily make those un-patented compounds in our labs, but even though their material was chemically identical, it wasn’t being made by an approved manufacturer and so had to be thrashed.