A young women was lucky enough to receive a kidney transplant only to have the kidney stop functioning after the government stopped paying for the anti-rejection meds 3 years after surgery, which is Medicare policy. Read Jeannette Castaneda heart breaking tale of of how her transplanted kidney stopped functioning after she could no longer afford her anti-rejection meds here. Basically, Medicare is willing to pay ~$100,000 for a transplant or ~$70,000 per year for dialysis but it won't pay ~$17,000 per year for anti-rejection drugs to keep the organ alive after 3 years. Once the organ fails and the person again is SUFFERING from ESRD, Medicare is happy to again pay for another transplant or diaysis. Make sense???!!!
After an organ transplant, patients need to take immunosuppressive (AKA ant-rejection) medicine for the rest of their lives to lower the probability of the body rejecting the transplanted organ. This leads to increased life expectancy for both the organ and the person.
Medicare covers dialysis or kidney transplantation for people with ESRD but stops covering the anti-rejection medicine 3 years after a person obtains a transplant.
Because of the expense of these drugs, people some time stop taking their medicine and the transplanted kidney stops functioning at an acceptable level and the person is again suffering from ESRD and needs another transplant or needs to go onto dialysis.
I wrote about this phenomenon in August 2010 here
I saw a thorough article about the subject titled Cost-effectiveness of extending Medicare coverage of immunosuppressive
medications to the life of a kidney transplant here.
There have been House and Senate bills
(see here and here for links to the proposed legislation) introduced to deal with this problem and make kidney transplant recipients eligible for anti-rejection medicine for life. This is the ethical thing to do because it increases life expectancy and improves quality of life of the kidney transplant recipient.
It also makes economic $en$e to pay ~$17,000 annually for anti-rejection medicine for the life of the patient because if the organ fails, then Medicare will again pay for ESRD treatment for the person - whether the $100K for a transplant (if you are lucky enough to get it before you die because of the long waiting list) or the ~$70K per year for dialysis.
What is wrong with our policy makers?
People are literally dying from their stupidity!!!
Today I heard about someone who donated his kidney to his father.
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