When you are suffering with a chronic disease, as I was for years, hope for a new treatment — or a cure — is sometimes all you have. That’s why House Bill 1102 raised hopes that it would provide a rapid path to reduced prescription drug costs — and why we were so disappointed to learn, after reading it, that it would provide no help to patients at all.

As a hepatitis C patient who was not only cured through medical innovation but who also labored through the often devastating physical and financial costs of living with a chronic disease, my family and I know that even the glimmer of a new treatment is what helped get us through difficult days.

I was prescribed the new antiviral treatment for hepatitis C soon after it I was released. I was so excited; I remember crying in my doctor’s office as he wrote the prescription. I was elated that the time had finally come to be treated. There are stories like ours across Colorado every day, and they are due to medical innovation and the development of new, life-saving medications. We should celebrate innovation, not seek to hamper and demonize, it as House Bill 1102 would do.

Like many other patients, my husband and I decided to start a small nonprofit to help others who are traveling this long and difficult road. In our work, we have learned how difficult it is to bring a new, effective drug to market. In the case of hepatitis C, we learned that to find a cure scientists had to first engineer tiny human livers and transplant them into mice so they could study this disease. This small component of the cost and time that goes into the new drug would not be explained as part of the so-called “snapshot” of costs that House Bill 1102 calls for.

In fact, the bill provides just enough information to make people mad but not information to give an accurate depiction of what really goes into the cost of producing a drug.

Equally frustrating is that the bill ignores the enormous and really immeasurable benefit to families like mine when we have access to a new medicine — a medicine that in the case of hepatitis C can prevent liver transplants. If I had to undergo such as transplant, the cost could have been upwards of half a million dollars or more, a cost that is multiples of the medicine that saved my life.

I recently came to the state Capitol to testify against this bill, and I brought some of our kids with me so that they could understand that it’s so important that we speak out and share our story. Providing real hope and longer lives to patients is what innovators in medicine do every day. House Bill 1102 provides false hope and empty promises and should be defeated.