The article seems to blame the Bayh–Dole Act and similar events that allowed Universities to sell government funded research results to the pharmaceutical industry. I don't believe this is the problem--the Bayh–Dole Act incentives new drugs. This explanation doesn't explain why off patent drugs have gone up in price.
I suspect the problem is market collusion and the FDA shutting down competitors on drugs where patents expired, which I believe is what happened during the epipen crisis.
Also forced non-competition... You simply can't make a generic version without your company being bought and/or litigated to death, preserving the just-barely-isnt-a-monopoly goal.
This happens in the garbage collection industry, people make competitors and offer 30% discounts on going rates, Waste Management or similar megacorp loses an entire county or region... Then they buy the company and slowly raise prices back up.
There's non-competes in the contract, but the owner doesn't care, they pocket 10 million and take a 1-year vacation then repeat the process. Only customers and employees are hurt (as there's less need for employees when the companies merge)
Same with pharma... Though I imagine there's extra pressure on the factories to not serve "little guy" as part of their contract with big pharma. So even if you have all the necessary process and expired patents, the industry stacked agreements and laws to make it nearly impossible.
Like many American industries, this is the kind of behaviour that caused Roosevelt (a Republican) to leverage the Sherman Anti-Trust Act... The key point being that mega corps were exploiting the populace and the only solution was to break up these giant monsterous companies that effectively created monopolies. He specifically targeted companies that used this power for ill, jacking up costs to consumers.
Now we are back at this point, but the public unrest hasn't reached a critical point while we are upset over other political issues, so big business continues to shovel buckets of money at Republicans to try and maintain the status quo until enough Americans get upset that politicians fear loosing their seat over the money (and right now, thanks to gerrymandering, enough politicians need 10% or more of their loyalty base to convert to the other party for that to be an issue.
In reality, this is a genius system that is perfectly legal... On the surface.
In the case of insulin, I think it has more to do with the FDA's processes than corruption.
It would be very difficult to make a profit on generic insulin because it's a biologic drug, which means a generic manufacturer wouldn't be able to bypass the FDA approval process by proving bioequivalency.
EDIT: Upon further reading, there is a pathway[0][1] for "biosimilars", but it seems to have higher requirements than chemical generics.
I suspect the problem is market collusion and the FDA shutting down competitors on drugs where patents expired, which I believe is what happened during the epipen crisis.