Progress In Kidney Care Starts At Home

[Northeast Agent]

A new Medicare program aims to increase the proportion of patients using home dialysis and receiving transplants.

Progress in Kidney Care Starts at Home

This fall, however, Medicare announced a mandatory program intended to transform that system, covering about 30 percent of beneficiaries with advanced chronic kidney disease, close to 400,000 people. Starting Jan. 1, it will use payment bonuses — and later, penalties — to try to increase the proportion of patients using home dialysis and receiving transplants.

Even experts with no love for the outgoing administration have called this approach the biggest change for kidney patients since 1972, when Richard M. Nixon signed legislation providing Medicare coverage for those in kidney failure, regardless of age.

 

[Life Hawk]

Even experts with no love for the outgoing administration have called this approach the biggest change for kidney patients since 1972, when Richard M. Nixon signed legislation providing Medicare coverage for those in kidney failure, regardless of age.

Hmm... Such strange way to word that sentence.

Very strange indeed.

 

[kgmom219]

In 2004, my grandmother at age 80 started in home dialysis. She was one of the first after the pilot program. At that time (and still), the rate of survival for dialysis done at a center (blood dialysis) was 3 years. They didn't have a longetivity rate for at home (peritoneal) dialysis because it was so new.

She passed in 2014, at age 90.

Its better for the patients and its cheaper for Medicare. This is a no brainer.