This phenomenon, what economists call “sticky pricing,” is common in pharmaceuticals. It has raised the prices in the United States of drugs for serious conditions including multiple sclerosis and diabetes even when there are multiple competing drugs.

The problem is that companies have decided it is not in their interest to compete.

In situations where there can be only one winner, competing is a given. But a lot of life and a lot of business just isn’t like that, especially when a group of companies are all doing good business by selling a type of drug for a very high price. There’s cover in numbers.

When you’re driving on the highway where a speed limit is 55 and most everyone’s going 70, you’re likely to increase your speed, too. Why should you feel bad? Why would the cop single you out? Someone else in a flashy car is probably doing 90. (For drug makers, Mr. Shkreli would be the hot-dogger who gives others cover.)

The parties are not really colluding. Drivers aren’t calling one another up to agree to drive too fast; no manufacturers (one hopes) are sitting at a country club agreeing to keep their prices high. This makes drug makers difficult to prosecute under racketeering or restraint of trade laws.

And shaming is in the eye of the beholder. The companies’ “stakeholders” are not really, after all, patients, but shareholders, who most likely will support attempts to make as much money as possible.

But while drug prices in America are going up, many of the same drugs are cheaper — and repeatedly have their prices lowered — in other developed countries, where governments step in to regulate costs.

These countries conduct large-scale negotiations to set a national price or price ceiling that its government or hospitals or citizens will pay — a kind of speed limit. Some stipulate that prices decline as a drug ages. (Now you know why Novartis might have paid $1.2 million to Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer and “fixer,” after hearing the candidate’s threats.)