Medicare is using one of its biggest hammers to try to fix the dialysis system: how providers are paid
Chronic kidney disease, already a problem affecting millions of Americans, is only expected to become more prevalent as the country ages. For those with the disease, a transplant is the ideal treatment, but dialysis is their reality. Hundreds of thousands of Americans flock to clinics three times a week to have their blood filtered through — in the absence of a functioning kidney — a machine or their abdomen.
As a medical treatment, dialysis is a stopgap measure that fails to fix a chronic problem (average life expectancy on dialysis is five to 10 years). As an industry, dialysis has significant flaws, including a lag in home dialysis use. Critics argue dialysis clinics have for decades shirked a responsibility to help patients get on the kidney transplant waitlist and receive organs from living donors — the gold standard.
