If our government spends close to $180,000 on average per year for patients with kidney failure to either stay on dialysis (which isn’t fun) or get a transplant, but they only spend $17,000 on anti-rejection drugs (which MUST be taken for life after a transplant), then we have a problem.
If not enough money is spent on “immunosuppressant drugs,” then a patient can never have a successful kidney transplant unless they are very, very rich.
And transplants are expensive. The best way to spend the most money possible would be to pay for multiple transplants rather than a single transplant and the drugs that keep the new organ from failing.
Many patients stay on dialysis because they are afraid that they won’t be able to pay for the upkeep on a new kidney. But dialysis isn’t inexpensive either.
It makes so much more sense for the government to pay for a patient’s one transplant and anti-rejection drugs rather than more new kidneys and/or the painful process of dialysis. We need to rethink many parts of our health insurance policies and this is definitely one of them.
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