From an economic and policy perspective, unfortunately, Turing is doing everything right. Makena is probably not a great comparison as its used for prevent early birth, which is something of an edge case for certain pregnant women, versus Daraprim, which is a more common drug. It is the only FDA approved drug for Toxoplasmosis. According to wikipedia: Up to half of the world's population is infected with toxoplasmosis.[8] In the United States about 23% are affected[9] and in some areas of the world this is up to 95%
What no one seems to be discussing here, is why there is such a long approval process from the FDA for generics? Ideally, someone should be able to ramp up production of this quickly, but apparently it takes years just to get the FDA to test your generic, even if its detected in the lab as being 100% chemically identical to the now expired patented drug. Turing is using this lag time to its benefit, but why aren't we yelling at the FDA to move faster on this kind of thing? I guess this might be moot because Turing can simply drop prices to scare off the investors of this hypothetical generic competitor. Say its x amount to launch this and they need to sell at $25 a pill for 10 years to break even. Turing now drops its price to $24 a pill. They're going to have a lot more flexibility here than someone entering the market from scratch and as long as they're selling above the old generic rate, they will continue to make serious money.
Also, from perhaps a less practical POV, considering what the government spends on medicare (3% of our GDP), perhaps it should be building its own generic drug producing plants. Private industry has 20 long years to make profit on patented drugs, but after that it should go into a federal program. This avoid these situations entirely, cut costs, etc. Or regulate prices on generics, or heaven forbid, finally bite the bullet and migrate into a Euro-style socialized medicine/single payer system and be able to bargain with big pharma as one 800lbs gorilla as opposed to hundreds of 6lbs capuchins.
Expecting people seeking profit to "act nice" is asinine. We can insult Shkreli all day but it doesn't change the status quo. Even if he's an outlier, how long is your average white collar criminal case resolution, assuming he's even doing something illegal? 2, 3, 4, or even 5 years? That's a long time for a drug to be off market or be unaffordable to people who need it.
Right now a lot of people are looking at this business plan with envy. In fact, this kind of generic trickery is status quo - see the "reformulations" of generics and then stopping production of that generic. The system is broken if it allows this kind of thing. What we need is a system that's not broken and that can't be gamed this easily. The current regulation model guarantees companies like Turing doing exactly this.
Sadly, online discussions often degenerate into witch-hunts with the assumption that if we stop this one guy, then everything will be fine. I guess its much less emotionally satisfying to discuss systemic political or regulatory issues.