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!!!
Monday, December 19, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Progress: Bone Marrow Donors Can Now Be Paid For Certain Donations
A legal loophole currently exists which allows people to be paid for their donation of bone marrow when its made through a process similar to a blood donation. They will not be opening themselves up to prosecution which can lead to a fine and jail time.
See this opinion piece by Sally Satel, M.D. (who deserves a big kudos for valiantly challenging the political and medical community hegemony which outlaw people from exchanging valuable consideration, otherwise known as money, to obtain an organ transplant) here which was in the Wall Street Journal this morning for more details.
Obviously, if people want to make altruistic organ and tissue donations, they should be lauded for their sacrifice.
But many people die while awaiting a donation. So paying people to donate is an alternative which should be legal when coupled with certain legal protections. See my posts about the subject here and here Also, we pay physicians for their efforts to keep poeple alive, we pay companies for artificial heart pumps which keep people alive, and we pay for dialysis to keep people alive. Why shouldn't we allow people to pay for organs in a regulated environment to insure people are informed of all of the reasons both pro and con and them let them make their own informed decisions!!!???
The following is a paragraph excerpted from an earlier post realting to this subject:
There is currently a government policy forbidding “valuable consideration” which is legalese for money to be exchanged between parties in order for one party to supply a kidney to the other party who is suffering from ESRD. This policy was introduced as an attempt to squelch the market for trafficking of human organs. While the intentions might arguably have been noble at the time the legislation was passed, with the benefit of hindsight, the unintended consequence of this legislation leads to additional thousands of people dying annually who are on the U.S. kidney transplantation waiting registry but succumb to the vagaries of ESRD before a kidney become available for transplantation.
It is time to modernize and change the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA) so that one more person doesn't have to die needlessly because of this antiquated and obsolete law!!!
See this opinion piece by Sally Satel, M.D. (who deserves a big kudos for valiantly challenging the political and medical community hegemony which outlaw people from exchanging valuable consideration, otherwise known as money, to obtain an organ transplant) here which was in the Wall Street Journal this morning for more details.
Obviously, if people want to make altruistic organ and tissue donations, they should be lauded for their sacrifice.
But many people die while awaiting a donation. So paying people to donate is an alternative which should be legal when coupled with certain legal protections. See my posts about the subject here and here Also, we pay physicians for their efforts to keep poeple alive, we pay companies for artificial heart pumps which keep people alive, and we pay for dialysis to keep people alive. Why shouldn't we allow people to pay for organs in a regulated environment to insure people are informed of all of the reasons both pro and con and them let them make their own informed decisions!!!???
The following is a paragraph excerpted from an earlier post realting to this subject:
There is currently a government policy forbidding “valuable consideration” which is legalese for money to be exchanged between parties in order for one party to supply a kidney to the other party who is suffering from ESRD. This policy was introduced as an attempt to squelch the market for trafficking of human organs. While the intentions might arguably have been noble at the time the legislation was passed, with the benefit of hindsight, the unintended consequence of this legislation leads to additional thousands of people dying annually who are on the U.S. kidney transplantation waiting registry but succumb to the vagaries of ESRD before a kidney become available for transplantation.
It is time to modernize and change the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA) so that one more person doesn't have to die needlessly because of this antiquated and obsolete law!!!
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