The ongoing EpiPen debacle has served one useful purpose: it has plainly revealed the uninhibited avarice — and general dysfunction — at the core of the American pharmaceutical system.

The saga of the EpiPen — and the chicanery of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, its merchant but not its maker — exemplifies a slew of troubling developments that have been unfolding throughout the pharmaceutical universe in recent years. Most prominently, of course, there is the appalling price-gouging: Mylan bought the EpiPen in 2007, at which point a pair of them went for about $100; then, as the New York Times reported, it proceeded to jack the price up, at an accelerating pace, to over $600 currently.

This massive and entirely arbitrary sixfold price increase produced a windfall for the company, and made its CEO Heather Bresch colossally rich in the process. Her annual salary skyrocketed from around $2.5 million in 2007, as NBC News reported, to an absurd $18.9 million by 2015.