A new drug for the liver disease hepatitis C is scaring people. Not because the drug is dangerous — it’s generally heralded as a genuine medical breakthrough — but because it costs $1,000 a pill and about $84,000 for a typical person’s total treatment.

A Washington advocacy effort has sprung up overnight, largely devoted to objecting to the cost of this one medication, Sovaldi. Members of Congress have started a joint investigation into how its maker, Gilead Sciences, settled on its price.

“Clearly, $1,000 a pill strikes people as completely unreasonable,” said John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, an advocacy group that has been raising an outcry about the drug’s price as “unsustainable.” Gilead“stepped in it when they decided to go for that cost per pill, because people can’t imagine why that could be justified.”

But maybe we are looking at the costs of Sovaldi in the wrong way. One reason it is causing such angst among insurers and state Medicaid officials is that treatment costs are coming all at once.

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