[thomastjeffery]

Except $1 millon is not the entire economy.

It's easy to hide resources by equating them to their monetary value.

The fact is that there exist many millions of dollars, and the way each dollar is spent does not determine the way another dollar is spent.

[lisper]

So what? Dollars are still proxies for finite resources, and there are only three possible ways to procure them: their owners can give them voluntarily, they can be forcibly seized by the government through taxation, or the government can print them, which produces inflation and effectively seizes a little bit from everyone who holds dollars (essentially a tax on savings). If you can't get someone to voluntarily spend $1M to save a life, which of the other two processes do you propose to use?

[tptacek]

This isn't complicated. Say there are 1,000 LPLD patients in North America (a wild overestimate). Then treating them with this therapy costs us $1Bn. If we limit ourselves to health care problems, is $1Bn better spent on these 1,000 LPLD patients, or on increasing penetration of existing therapies for other conditions? It seems likely to be the latter.

To believe LPLD therapy objectively deserves the allocation you're talking about, you have to believe that there aren't other cohorts of patients that are currently underserved. But we know that isn't true.