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There are drugs that cost way more than this. And Medicare is covering them.

Bad things happen to people, but insurance coverage need not be the same for all of them. People can have disastrous accidents. Any of us might trip and fall down the stairs at any time, or be hit by a drunk driver. In a rational market, people would have insurance against catastrophic costs to cover this -- but if you engage in highly risky sports or have a record of alcohol or drug abuse that significantly increases your risk of accidental injury, you would get an adverse rating and pay a premium.

Aside from accidents, hideously expensive medical conditions that are entirely outside of our own control can and do occur. These are essentially random. In a rational market, insurance would naturally pay for these. Some of these medical events, however, are not entirely random; they are linked to obesity, smoking, drug use, etc., and you could and should be rated for these factors.

Then there are medical costs that are linked primarily to lifestyle factors. Here people should be on their own hook. I should not be obligated to pay for your bad habits, nor should you be obligated to pay for mine (on the purely hypothetical assumption that I had any). Sexual misbehavior is one of the biggies in this area, along with smoking, alcohol and drug use, and obesity. Drug abusing fat pigs with STD's should pay their own blankety-blank medical costs.

The left has succeeded in framing this entire discussion as a matter of insurance companies "discriminating" against people with serious medical conditions. We need to reframe the discussion. This should be properly considered as a matter of people being rewarded for their good behavior and personal discipline. Avoid the common vices, keep in reasonably good shape, and keep your pants zipped up when you should, and you should enjoy preferred premium status when it comes to insurance. Instead, under current law and regulation, you get treated as a chump, a cash cow to subsidize other people's bad behavior.

It is not true that all of this simply cancels out, i.e. that everyone has essentially offsetting vices so that we can appropriately be dumped into a common risk pool.

The cost of a particular drug is a very secondary question. The real issue here is people with high risk lifestyles trying to offload the costs on someone else via politicization of the insurance system.