Insulin prices have more than doubled in the last six years — and now people are dying because they can’t afford the drug

I'm almost positive some executive thought they were helping people fight obesity or some dumb shit by doing this

I think you're overlooking the more obvious charge more, get more philosophy of business.

"We do not believe that there is a conspiracy to keep insulin expensive," he says.

Yet somehow it remains very affordable north and south of the USA borders.

"Rather, he says, incremental improvements in the drug — and the disappearance of older versions, which aren't as profitable — are more likely explanations."

This is a pretty common tactic. From Elizabeth Rosenthal's An American Sickness:

The industry name for this maneuver is “product hopping,” and Warner Chilcott was, historically, a master artist. A lawsuit filed by Mylan Pharmaceuticals alleged that Warner intentionally moved its acne medication Doryx from one form to another three times in order to stymie the launch of a generic. It swapped a capsule for a tablet; developed a version that could be broken up and sprinkled on applesauce; and introduced a new scored pill. Since generics must be identical in dosage and form to the brand-name drug for a pharmacist to substitute, each move succeeded in delaying competition from generics for years.

I don't know enough about insulin formation to know if it's susceptible to product hopping, but Rosenthal does specifically name insulin on the previous page of the book and uses it as an example of how companies can use lawsuits to protect products and prevent better care:

In 2013 the world’s bestselling brand of insulin was Lantus, owned by Sanofi Aventis, which was scheduled to lose U.S. patent protection in 2015. Lantus is taken daily by many type 1 diabetics along with short-acting insulin to dampen the high and low swings of blood sugar. Sanofi had a virtual monopoly on this market, worth billions, and increased U.S. prices by 25 percent in 2013. Patients had trouble affording the $300 a month jacked-up price. So many American diabetics were ordering Lantus from Canada that the FDA sent warning letters to firms like CanaRx informing them that the practice was illegal; it noted that the drug must be shipped cold and could be harmed in transit. (One skeptical diabetic noted, “Why is it I can order steaks and seafood from California that’ll arrive frozen and cold from over 3,000 miles away, yet I can’t get 52° insulin from Canada?”)

When I asked Susan Brooks, a spokesperson for Sanofi, about the price increase, she was open about the strategy to optimize profit with cheaper generic products on the horizon, “which might result in lower prices for all products within a given therapeutic class” (emphasis mine). Eli Lilly, another giant in the world of diabetes, had created a “biosimilar” (e.g., generic) version of Lantus and was prepared to launch as soon as Lantus’s U.S. patents lapsed. Indeed, Lilly’s Lantus biosimilar was already in use in many developed countries, where intellectual property laws are less business-friendly and patents less litigated.

In 2014, to eke out a little more time with patent protection for Lantus in the United States, Sanofi sued, claiming that the Lilly product violated four patents, which triggered the automatic thirty-month Hatch-Waxman “waiting period.” “So the biggest thing that will affect patients with type 1 diabetes here is being decided legally not medically,” David Kliff, editor of Diabetic Investor and himself a person with type 1 diabetes, told me. “I know that sounds crazy but it’s true. The only people who win are the lawyers and the patent holder.” After some further backroom business deals between the two companies, the legal action was “settled” and the patent was set to expire in December 2016.

If you're at all interested in American healthcare and the ways in which it is dysfunctional, the book is a recommended read.

Turns out supply and demand gets turned on it's head when you only have the options to buy the medication or die.