The media have been full of hand-wringing stories in recent weeks over Sovaldi. The new hepatitis C drug is apparently an effective treatment for the debilitating and potentially deadly liver disease. However, Gilead Sciences, Sovaldi’s patent holder, charges $84,000 for a three-month course of treatment.

There are an estimated 3 million people with hep C in the United States. This puts the tab to treat them at more than $250 billion. That would be a major cost to private insurers and public-sector programs such as Medicaid. This is the basis for the hand wringing: Should we require private insurers to pick up the tab for Sovaldi for hep C sufferers? Does everyone get treated or just the very sick? And should already stretched state Medicaid programs have to bear this additional burden?

The answers to these questions, however, are much easier for anyone who doesn’t mind bucking the drug companies. Sovaldi is expensive in the U.S. because the government gives Gilead Sciences a patent monopoly on the drug. It uses this monopoly to charge a price that is far above the free-market rate: A generic version is already available in Egypt for $900 per treatment. Indian generic manufacturers believe that they can produce the drug for less than $200.

This presents a simple and obvious way around the $84,000 problem: Send people to Egypt or India for a treatment that costs 1 percent as much or less. The U.S. could pay for family members to go as well, stay a full three months and still come out tens of thousands of dollars ahead. Certainly this can be presented as an option to people, perhaps throwing in a $5,000 or $10,000 incentive to make the trip worth their while.

The savings states could net from opting for this solution are enormous. They will all have large numbers of hep C sufferers, many of whom are covered by state Medicaid programs. For example, with a bit less than 12 percent of the country’s population, California, if it has a proportional number of people with hepatitis C, has about 350,000 sufferers. If one-third are on Medicaid and the total cost for treating someone in another country is $20,000, the state could save more than $7 billion by offering the option to be treated abroad. For Texas the potential savings by this calculation would be about $4.8 billion and for New Jersey some $1.7 billion.

These huge potential savings present a great opportunity for California’s Jerry Brown, Texas’ Rick Perry, New Jersey’s Chris Christie and other governors to show themselves as tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to save taxpayers’ money. That is, unless they are scared to stand up to the drug industry.