There are lots of problems here: (1) Medicine has a very inelastic demand function. If you need substance X to stay alive, you'll pay anything to get it. (2)

There are lots of problems here: (1) Medicine has a very inelastic demand function. If you need substance X to stay alive, you'll pay anything to get it. (2) Costs are hidden from consumers. If insurance / Medicare is paying for it, it literally makes no difference to the end user if it's $5, $50, or $50,000. (3) Free-market forces are distorted by patent monopolies and lack of diversity in the supply chain. With a patent, you can crank up the price as high as you want. Ditto if you're the only supplier and it'll take some time for competitors to bring production online, or you can deny them access to samples for the equivalence testing your competitors need to prove to regulators that their drug is the same as your drug. (4) Broken incentives for developing new drugs. A patient's going to be taking a drug to treat their diabetes / ED / high blood pressure for the rest of their life, whereas something like an antibiotic is only taken for a couple weeks. Guess which one is more profitable, hence attracts more R&D money? What's the solution? I don't know. Maybe market reforms to align the incentives; perhaps even bounding pharmaceutical companies' profit margin to some multiple of their costs (but of course you'd have to be careful about the wording of the regulation and auditing for compliance, to make sure it can't be gamed by e.g. deliberately inflating the costs). Or perhaps even some kind of socialism where the government tells people what to produce or how much to sell it for (agricultural subsidies might be regarded similarly -- the government is deliberately manipulating the market to push down the price and push up the supply of goods necessary to sustain life, so shocks don't result in lethal shortages). Bernie Sanders at one point talked about replacing patents for new drugs with prizes, but I think he may have given up on that.