[justinpombrio]

The median lifetime earnings in the US is $1.7 million or so [1]. $84 thousand is 5% of that. 5% of all the money you will ever make is a lot, considering that most of that money is already accounted for by college tuition, housing, and transportation. Also consider that this is a lump sum, that you weren't planning for it, and that this may happen in the middle of your life when you've only made a fraction of all the money you will ever make.

[1] https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg...

[zaroth]

I think you need to factor in that it's not the individual personally paying 5% of their earnings, the personal cost is simply one year of your insurance out-of-pocket max. Anyone and everyone should be ready, willing, and able to pay for one year of whatever their out-of-pocket maximum is in order to access a miracle cure for a terminal illness.

The better question is what are insurance companies actually paying and how much should they have to pay? And then we get to the actual reason the drug is priced so high... it's because it is actually less expensive per cured human than all the alternatives. At $84k, this drug is actually saving insurance companies money per-cure.

The problem is that the cure is so damn good that everyone wants it right away, where-as the previous choices sucked badly so only a small percentage of the inflicted even went for it. Exactly how the OP describes, the cure is so good and so free of side-effects, patients want it even before they are showing symptoms of the disease! Of course the insurance companies can't afford to cure the planet of HepC all in one year -- there has to be a way to spread the (lower) cost over time.