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Millions of Americans, in Minnesota and elsewhere, share the growing concern about the cost of health care, whether it's insurance premiums, hospitalization or prescription drugs. Yet it is crucial that any reforms don't jeopardize the health of patients with life-threatening illnesses — patients like me.

I have a legitimate reason to fear this. A health care think tank, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), is looking at treatment costs for the disease I have — multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of cells in the bone marrow. My concern is that ICER is right now developing an analysis — first for my disease, then for others — that focuses solely on drug costs. Health care companies and federal policymakers will likely use it to deny treatment they deem too expensive.

It's called a "value framework." The one for my disease will be on full display this Thursday, after which the group will begin releasing similar frameworks for other life-threatening illnesses, including lung cancer, multiple sclerosis and more.

To better understand how this could affect someone in your life, let me tell you my story. When I was first diagnosed 13 years ago, my doctor's optimistic prognosis for me was to live three to five years. But medical progress in the intervening years has changed everything for me and tens of thousands of others. Thirteen years later, I'm not only alive, but well.

I started running marathons when I was diagnosed — an activity my wife and daughter and I could do together to make the most of whatever time was left. I've just run my 95th marathon, and I'm 75 years old. Marathons are not a reason to pay for costly treatments, but they make it clear that I can still have an active and productive life. In fact, I still work part time and contribute to the economy. I pay taxes and insurance premiums. I just sold one house and bought another.

I'm still running marathons because of medical progress. A pill to treat the cancer was potent enough to hold the disease in check, and tolerable enough to let me run races in all 50 states and Canada. And because it was a pill, I wasn't tethered to an IV pole.

Now the myeloma has once again reared its ugly head. But again because of still more medical progress, I can add a new regimen to my pill. This is an IV, but as I've said, it's not your grandfather's chemotherapy. I had an infusion on a Tuesday, ran a marathon on a Sunday and came back the next Tuesday for another treatment.

Now along comes ICER and its "value frameworks" — complicated mathematical formulas to determine a price for my treatments and the value of my life. That sounds good in theory, but what they're really talking about is rationing health care, limiting patient access based on some arbitrary cost. In fact, the framework for multiple myeloma determines that someone with my disease may be worth only three-fifths of what a healthy person is worth.

The problem is that no mathematical formula can measure a patient's worth. We're individuals, not averages. Some do better on a specific treatment, others with another option. Nor can value be based on a snapshot in time. With some treatments, as they're used longer, they can be applied to an increasing number of indications and their value actually increases with time.

If you want to calculate value, figure that my treatment doesn't just benefit me but also my wife of 53 years, my sons and daughter, and my grandchildren, who know me only because of medical innovation. A "value framework" could never account for this. Yet it is specifically designing this system so that policymakers and health care companies can implement it for a variety of diseases in the years ahead.

This risks turning back the clock on much of the progress that has occurred in the treatment of my disease, to say nothing of the millions of others with different life-threatening illnesses. Where's the value in that?

Don Wright, of Stillwater, is a semiretired lawyer, computer consultant and engineer.