In The US Health System
Transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive anti-rejection drugs for as long as the transplanted kidney functions. For the routine immunosuppressives Prograf, Cellcept and prednisone, these drugs cost US$1,500 per month. In 1999 Congress passed a law that restricts Medicare from paying for more than three years for these drugs, unless the patient is otherwise Medicare eligible. Transplant programs may not transplant a patient unless the patient has a reasonable plan to pay for medication after the medicare expires, however, patients are almost never turned down for financial reasons alone. 50% of patients with end-stage renal disease only have Medicare coverage.
In March 2009 a bill was introduced in the Senate, 565 and in the House, H.R. 1458 that will extend Medicare coverage of the drugs for as long as the patient has a functioning transplant. This means that patients who have lost their jobs and insurance will not also lose their kidney and be forced back on dialysis. Dialysis is currently using up $17 billion yearly of Medicare funds and total care of these patients amounts to over 10% of the entire Medicare budget.
Read more about this topic: Kidney Transplantation
Famous quotes containing the words health and/or system:
“Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)