A greedy mentality of identifying companies that can be acquired simply by where you can get away with raising prices by the largest percentage possible.

Has real public policy and healthcare ramifications.

And make no mistake. You can try to dress up this business model with do good sounding phrases, but it is very simple.

Purchase the companies that develop a drug that has little to no competition.

Give them a healthy profit. Fire the scientists and jack the prices up as high as you possibly can get away with.

It's using patients as hostages. It's immoral. It hurts real people.

It makes Americans very, very angry.

That Senator Claire McCaskill questioning officials and investors of Valiant Pharmaceuticals on April 27th, 2016.

She's describing the company's business strategy of acquiring other drug companies, cutting their costs, and drastically raising the prices of the products.

A strategy viewed by most as unethical and greedy. But Valiant shareholders love the company's new business model because it was lucrative and perfectly legal.

This controversial strategy was implemented by Valiant's new CEO, Michael Pearson, who was hired to head the company in 2008, even though he had no prior experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

He had spent the past two decades working at McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm where his father had also worked.

When Pearson took control of Valiant, it was just another pharmaceutical company investing heavily in developing new drugs of its own, while hardly turning a profit.

One of his first orders of business was to engineer a reverse merger with another struggling pharmaceutical company based in Canada in order to lower Valiant's tax burden.

The second step of his plan was to gut the research and development activities of the company. Pearson believed that money spent on developing new drugs was money wasted.

There's a misperception about us. It's not that we don't like R&D, we just have a different model. What we don't think is a good bet is early stage science. Most drugs get discovered by universities and entrepreneurs not by large drug companies.

Wasting money was not part of Michael Pearson's philosophy. A typical pharmaceutical company allocates about 20% of its total budget for the purpose of R&D.

The R&D budget at Valiant had been slashed to just 3%. Pearson felt that there was better earning potential through buying out rival more established drug companies.

Well, because they create even more value for shareholders and that's my job. It's our board's job is to do whatever we can to create value for shareholders.

Valiant pharmaceuticals became the darling of Wall Street around 2010. The company began using massive amounts of debt to rapidly acquire other pharmaceutical companies and ruthlessly firing the scientists and research departments.

Valiant would then take the drugs that had acquired through these acquisitions and increase the prices. And they were mostly drugs for rare diseases without generic alternatives.

Drugs like Cyprin, which is used to treat Wilson's disease, and inherited and potentially fatal condition if untreated, that caused this copper to accumulate in vital organs.

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