A complaint from within the NHS about the prices of PPE:

“I’ve been offered surgical masks at three or four times the price; I’ve been offered FFP3 masks at 10 times the price… It is blatant profiteering, in my opinion,” he said.

...

“This particular one was a company we’d used before and, although we have seen a hike in some prices, to see coveralls going from £2 as they were in January to £16.50 was outrageous."

Something is in short supply compared to current demand. The price goes up. Sure, this is profiteering. But also:

Mr Hulme continued: “I get probably get between five and 10 emails a day from various companies saying they can offer me PPE, some of them I don’t trust because they’re not companies that we’ve used before or they’re not on the supply list of the NHS.

The lust for those profits leads more people to try to supply that item in that short supply compared to current demand. Further:

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said earlier this week that trusts are being forced into “hand-to-mouth” workarounds, including washing single-use gowns and restricting stocks to key areas.

The desire not to pay those higher prices leads to those workarounds which reduce demand.

Back to basics here, demand has risen compared to supply. We’d like a system which was able to try to balance these two. Increase supply, reduce demand. This is what, as the above shows, the price system does.

Rising prices achieves exactly our goal - and people are complaining?