So it's OK to house these guys for $millions of dollars a year, while innocent people are dying waiting for funds for a heart operation?
The cost of lifetime incarceration is a problem, but not as much of a problem as a murder trial where the sentence might be the death penalty if the evidence of murder trials in the US are anything to go by. It is actually cheaper to put someone in prison for 50 years than it is to carry out a single execution. Of course, some murder trials are relatively cheap, but other (like that of OJ Simpson) are excessively expensive. And then there is the almost endless appeal process as evidenced by the case of Ronald Smith who h was sentenced to death in Montana in 1983 and has yet to be executed.