Free Trade: The Answer to the Question of "How do you pay for a drug that costs $84,000?"

Wonkblog let down its readers badly in a piece on Sovaldi, the hepatitis C drug that Gilead Sciences is marketing in the United States at the price of $84,000 per treatment. While the post is headlined with the question in the title, it never makes the obvious point that the drug really doesn't "cost" $84,000.

This is the price that Gliead Sciences charges. It is able to get away with charging the price because the government gave it a patent monopoly, which means that any competitors would b...