People with certain kinds of allergies carry the device with them. Always. It means the difference between, say, a bee sting being merely a painful nuisance and death from anaphylactic shock. So the market for what is called an "EpiPen" is pretty much guaranteed. If you are someone with one of those allergies, this is not a discretionary expense. You'll pay whatever it costs.

Which might explain why, as reported by Bloomberg, Mylan NV, the company that manufactures the EpiPen, has raised the price some 400 percent over the last few years at the same time it was spending $4 million on lobbying for something called the 2013 School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act.

To this point, the story is typical Washington, D.C. stuff, more or less. It's unseemly, perhaps, especially when you add as another element the fact that the company recently did one of those corporate tax "inversions," whereby it moved its corporate address overseas to avoid taxes while keeping its principal executive office … in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

But what really makes this a story of contemporary Washington, D.C., and the political class that prospers there, is the fact that the CEO of the company is one Heather Bresch, the daughter of Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. So far, she isn't talking. Which means, probably, that she and her flacks are working on their story—with, no doubt, some invaluable advice and input from Dad.