Trump calls for revamped approach to kidney disease
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday revamping care for kidney disease so more people whose kidneys fail can have a chance at early transplants and home dialysis, and others don’t get that sick in the first place.
Trump said his order was aimed at “making life better and longer for millions” by increasing the supply of donated kidneys, making it easier for patients to have dialysis in the comfort of their own homes and prioritizing the development of an artificial kidney.
The changes won’t happen overnight because some initiatives will require new government regulations.
Because a severe organ shortage complicates the call for more transplants, the Trump administration will try to ease the financial hardships for living donors by reimbursing them for expenses such as lost wages and child care.
“Those people, I have to say, have never gotten enough credit,” Trump said. “What they do is so incredible.”
Another key change: steps to help the groups that collect deceased donations do a better job. Trump said it may be possible to find 17,000 more kidneys and 11,000 other organs from deceased donors for transplant every year.
For families like those of 1-year-old Hudson Nash, the lack of organs is frightening. Hudson was born with damaged kidneys, and his parents hope he will be big enough for a transplant in another year. Until then, “to keep him going, he takes numerous medicines, receives multiple shots, blood draws and more doctors’ visits than I can count,” said his mother, Jamie Nash of Santa Barbara, Calif.
Today’s system favors expensive, time-consuming dialysis in large centers — what Trump called so onerous “it’s like a full-time job” — over easier-to-tolerate at-home care or transplants that help patients live longer.
More than 30 million American adults have chronic kidney disease, costing Medicare a staggering $113 billion.
Careful treatment — including control of diabetes and high blood pressure, the two main culprits — can help prevent further kidney deterioration. But more than 700,000 people have end-stage renal disease, meaning their kidneys have failed, and need a transplant or dialysis to survive. Only about one-third received specialized care before they got so sick.
“My health care providers failed me at the beginning of the dialysis continuum,” said transplant recipient Tunisia Bullock of Rocky Mount, N.C. Her kidney failure struck while she was being treated for another disease, and she woke up in the hospital attached to a dialysis machine. She told Trump that she hoped the new initiatives help other patients find care “with less confusion and more ease.”
More than 94,000 of the 113,000 people on the national organ waiting list need a kidney. Last year, there were 21,167 kidney transplants. Of those, 6,442 were from living donors, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system.