If it was billed to insurance, they would pass those costs over to the people paying the premiums.
Some insurance policies are self-funded: Meaning they have plans, but the insurance company is really just the administrator. The actual costs are paid by the company employing the people buying the insurance. They can both pass the costs onto the employees paying health insurance premiums plus add in that cost to the goods they sell.
A great deal of insurance plans have a co-payment for drugs. If you had to pay 20% of the cost of this drug, that is still quite an increase for the patient.
Not everyone needing these drugs has insurance. Luckily, some charities exist to try to pay the bills for these folks and sometimes there are other discounts available for the uninsured.
Some people are on government insurance plans, both in the US and in places with state health care. In these cases, the costs are passed onto tax payers.
Sorry, but pretty much everyone pays for this sort of thing.
The whole idea of employer-paid insurance in the U.S. is an artifact of some tax law jiggery pokery back in (if I'm remembering right) the Depression/WWII era. Before that people paid for their own health insurance.
Who takes them out of the total amount they are willing to pay for labor, so it still comes from the insured.
See also: the way that most people view a tax refund as "free money" that the government is "giving" them, rather than them having given the government an interest-free loan of that money (which is the actual case).
When they get a (partial) refund of the taxes withheld, they're happy, rather than being disappointed that they've had too much withheld (as homo economicus would).
If, instead, no taxes were withheld and they were forced to come up with the (non-refunded) portion in a lump sum payment once a year they'd be outraged.
Human psychology and math don't really overlap that much.
In one sense, yes, the money the employer pays would be available for wages, but the problem is that any savings would come out of a pool of potential wages for all employees. There is no direct incentive for an individual employee to save money on health care, because those savings will make zero impact on his paycheck.
One way of trying to get around this is, of course, the "copay". If the employee saves money, he does, in most cases, have a somewhat smaller copay. But the incentive isn't nearly as high as it would be if all the savings accrued directly to the employee.
It's the difference between a $10 co-pay for a generic drug, a $25 or $50 co-pay for a non-generic drug, and a 30-percent co-pay for a specialty drug.
This is the fallacy. He didn't get rich from increasing the amount of misery in the world. He didn't give people toxoplasmosis. He got rich from not doing something he could do (i.e. sell drugs more cheaply) to decrease the amount of misery. Which is the exact same thing you do when you buy a Macbook Pro instead of donating the money to save a life from malaria: you forgo the opportunity to decrease the amount of misery in the world in return for your own personal benefit.