Casting Martin Shkreli as the lone villain in a drama of drugs and greed - Breaking Bad meets Wolf of Wall Street - is not only about affordable healthcare, it's also about how we expect the 1 per cent to behave.

On Thursday morning, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals fronted US Congress to answer questions about why he had raised the price of Daraprim - a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a disease that can be fatal to HIV patients - from under $20 to $750 per tablet.

Shkreli, you'll remember, has the title of most hated man in America. Even Donald Trump has lined up to take a swing. Trump, the son of a wealthy New York property developer, called Shkreli, the son of an Albanian janitor, a "spoiled brat".

A bit like Trump, Shkreli seems to enjoy playing the villain - his media persona is unrepentant, outspoken, almost self-parodying. The 32-year-old broadcasts online videos from a darkened corporate headquarters and comes across as brainy and awkward. In a time of lingering dismay about the excesses of American capitalism and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, Shkreli, a former Wall Street hedge fund manager, seems to personify everything that is wrong with the system - he is arrogant, rude and smug, a tech-heavy dude bro throwing down lighting bolts without compassion for the peasant class below.

But worst of all, he doesn't pander to our need to believe in corporate social conscience. He doesn't perform his compassion. He seems bemused by our naivety.

'I want to plead with you'

On Thursday, this seemed to reach its absurd conclusion, with Republican and Democrat senators lecturing Shkreli on his bad behaviour, while the "pharma bro" came across as something between Superman's Lex Luthor and Austen Powers' Dr Evil - smirking at the elected representatives, mocking their august institution, and showing utter contempt for liberal platitudes.

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Whatsapp Martin Shkreli before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Here's Elijah Cummings - a Democrat and firm believer in government regulation of industry - basically begging the executive to find a conscience:

Cummings: I want to ask you -- no, I want to plead with you -- to use any remaining influence you have over your former company to press them to lower the prices of these drugs. ... I wish you could see the faces of these people who cannot get the drugs they need. ... You are in a unique position, really you are. You have a spotlight and you have a platform you could use that attention to come clean, to right your wrongs and become the most effective patient advocate in the country, and one that would make a big difference in so many people's lives.

Skip YouTube Video FireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame.

The missing word is regulation. In Australia, as in Europe and Canada, government sets the price for life-saving medication like Daraprim. A pack of 50 tablets costs less than $15 in an Australian pharmacy - about 18 cents per tablet. In America, the price is not regulated, and so the company sets it according to supply and demand - whatever people are willing to pay. It turns out people are willing to pay quite a lot for a life-saving drug.

Even before Shkreli, US Daraprim was 100 times more expensive than in Australia.

Shkreli bumped the price of Daraprim in September after acquiring the drug from Impax Laboratories in August for $55 million.

"We know these days that modern pharmaceuticals and cancer drugs can cost $100,000 or more," he said in an interview with Bloomberg shortly after the massive price hike. "Daraprim is still underpriced compared to its peers."

'The investors don't like this stuff'

Daraprim is the trade name of the drug pyrimethamine that has been available since the 1950s - the same decade that its patent expired. Because pyrimethamine is out of patent it can be manufactured as a generic drug, but this never happened because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification process is so arduous.

Whoever owned the certification had a monopoly on a life-saving drug with no maximum price. Shkreli was gaming the established system.

All of which Congress knew when it asked the notorious one to come to Washington. Which begs the question, what were lawmakers trying to achieve? Shkreli declined to answer every one of their questions, repeating the line given to him by his attorney, invoking his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Afterwards he tweeted:

Skip Twitter Tweet FireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame. Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) February 4, 2016

From his point of view, elected representatives were asking him to do the job of government - reforming industry, softening the hard edges of capitalism.

The irony here is that Shkreli's headline-grabbing exponential price hike has brought scrutiny of the pricing structure of the pharmaceuticals industry, and could lead to reform. Among the stack of documents uncovered by the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform was an email from an unknown executive to Shkreli:

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Whatsapp Email from unnamed medical executive to Martin Shkreli.

For what it's worth, we've all been talking about this alot since you left and believe strongly that you shouldn't raise the price of Daraprim again. I think the benefit is not worth the risk of getting yourself back in the news again, the politicians reengaged, etc etc . . . The investors don't like this stuff.

The benefits of higher profits is not worth the bad publicity. This suggests Shkreli was doing loudly what others have been doing discreetly. In the US, the National Community Pharmacists Association has reported a rash of dramatic price increases for generic drugs. "Some of the rises occurred virtually overnight," a senior vice president said in the organisation's bulletin. "And it continued to snowball and impact more and more medications."

Among the most shocking recent examples in the US are:

Doxycycline hyclate (100 milligrams), a widely used antibiotic, soared from $20 for 500 capsules in October 2013 to $1,849 in April 2014.

Glycopyrrolate (20 milliliters), used during surgery to prevent slowing of the heart rate, climbed from $65 for 10 vials to $1,277 during the same period.

Pravastatin sodium (10 mg), a cholesterol medication, surged from $27 to $196 for a one-year supply.

In 2015 Rodelis Therapeutics boosted the cost of 30 tablets of tuberculosis drug from $500 to $10,800. In the same year Valeant Pharmaceuticals International increased the prices of two heart drugs by 525 per cent and 212 per cent on the same day they acquired them.

"Our duty is to shareholders to maximise the value," a Valeant company spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal at the time.

Shkreli has been hated upon for his greed, but a truly greedy executive would avoid the media, especially social media, and use the banal veneer of corporate communications to justify regular and boring increases in prices. Shkreli's business plan may be morally bankrupt, he may not be a nice guy, but he's also part of a problem that can't be solved through hating on one man.