Ms. Bresch was in many ways acting in accordance with a core strategy in the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook — take something old and repackage it to make it new and patentable — and then see what price the market will bear. Sometimes extortionate prices are a predictable outcome. Yet the government has no real tools to curb them.

Many other old medications have been delivered in new packages in recent years, with startling price increases. Basic asthma inhalers, which once cost under $15 (and still do in many countries), cost $50 to $100 in the United States. A portion of the big price rises for insulin in recent years is attributable to new types of injectors to deliver the medicine. Long-off-patent emergency rescue drugs delivered by auto-injector — not just epinephrine, but also naloxone to reverse opiate overdose — have seen particularly perplexing price escalations.

New devices can make it more convenient and safer to deliver a lifesaving drug during a medical crisis. But when is new packaging — often accompanied by bells and whistles of uncertain value — worth an exponential rise in price? That’s something a nation struggling with a $3 trillion health bill must consider, and it merits a response beyond a few days of executive public shaming.

Like so much in our overpriced medical system, today’s EpiPen debacle evolved from a laudable idea: Though shots of epinephrine have been used for over a century, the EpiPen — invented in the mid-1970s and approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1987 — allowed a patient or a parent to easily administer the proper dose in an emergency. When an unlocked EpiPen is pressed against the thigh, a needle emerges to inject the medicine, even through clothes.

In recent decades it has become an increasingly attractive idea commercially as well: Research suggests that the incidence of allergies has been growing (a trend relentlessly publicized by Mylan). Also, “the social frenzy around allergies has spurred substantial demand,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of an influential recent article about combating high drug prices, noting that many families buy multiple kits, for school, home and car. Schools and camps bought in — it was easier (and legally prudent, perhaps) to have auto-injectors at the ready, rather than to draw epinephrine into a syringe.