I have been enjoying the postseason baseball experience (where the Phillies are managing to be the giant killers for both leagues).  Yeah, except for last night- a night of ignominy…

Amazingly, I have never lived in Philly (or even nearby), but became a Phanatic some 58 years ago  when Jim Bunning pitched the 7^th perfect game in baseball history on Father’s Day, 1964.  He had been traded from the Tigers (which had been my favorite team- by default since the Dodgers abandoned New York, along with the Giants)- and I went to see him pitch against the brand new New York Mets. That sealed the deal for me- I was hooked as a Phanatic.

Fifty years ago, there was another milestone in my life. having worked to get a major piece of legislation approved.  All that work culminated on 30 October 1972. That’s when Tricky Dick (aka, President Richard Milhous Nixon) signed into law the Medicare End Stage Renal Disease  (ESRD) (the bill started out as HR-1, and as law, became Section 299I of PL 92-603), thereby providing a means to  extend the lives of many a kidney patient.  (And, raising the program costs for Medicare dramatically, since roughly 1 dime of every buck that Medicare spends is now devoted to ESRD.)

Folks like me thought we’d need to allocate some $23K a year each  for hospital based patients, $18,500 each for those being treated in a specialized center (now called a dialysis clinic), and $ 19K each for the first year of home dialysis (dropping to $5K for subsequent years).  Oh, and more than ½ of the patients would return to work. And, there were only 10,000 patients being so treated.  (Now, it 550 K folks  getting dialysis and 240 K post-transplant- which is why the Medicare costs are so high.)

But, what we really need to do is follow through on one of the two good things TheDonald did for America.  (The other item was funding the R&D for the COVID vaccines, even though he didn’t want to promote them once they were created in record time.)   On the 10th of July 2019, TheDonald issued an Executive Order on Advancing American Kidney Health.   It was to promote home dialysis (better for patients and could lower the costs of the program, too) and transplantation.

We need to really devote more energy and thought to achieving these goals  To make those 50 years of the program extend its benefits longer and better.

Share this: