employees were treated with acthar, a drug that's been on the market since 1952. it's used to treat a rare and potentially fatal condition called infantile spasms, that afflicts about 2,000 babies a year. do you remember how much was on the budget for those two babies? >> morrissey: we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for these sick baby cases. >> stahl: close to $500,000-- >> morrissey: combined, yeah. >> stahl: --is what we heard. combined, yes. >> morrissey: yes. >> stahl: the drug works. it's considered the gold standard for infantile spasms. but as he discovered, it wasn't always so expensive. in 2001, acthar sold for about $40 a vial. today? more than $40,000. an increase of 100,000%! he wanted to know how that could have happened. but for two years, he kept running into a brick wall. why was it so hard to find out what was going on? and why? >> morrissey: it's absolute secrecy. there's an absolute opaque system of pricing for drugs in our country. that's part of the problem. >> stahl: his investigation got nowhere until last year, when the fed

>> the focus of the report is a drug whose price was hiked by martin proportions called h hp acthar gel4, they hiked the price in 2007 from $1650 a vile to more than $23,000 overnight and costs more than $38,000 now a vile the report this weekend focuses on a lawsuit filed by the city of rockford, illinois, saying it's cost for two patients treated with this totalled half a million dollars, and the lawsuit targets express scripps. they sold that business in november, but "60 minutes" reports on how businesses in the health care supply chain all benefit from higher drug prices suggesting that pharmacy benefit managers as they have been so often in the last few years will be in the cross hairs. in a statement, mallickrodt says no city in the law constitutes the law and should be dismissed in the entirety. they say that since it acquired the medicine, it's made, quote, only modest price adjustments in line with the pledge on drug pricing in which it vows to price drugs responsibly. this is not an unusual story, kelly, you see the price hikes over the last few years, a lot of people know ab