For four years, I have served my community as a social worker dedicated to helping dialysis patients. I have seen both the everyday problems kidney patients face and the larger issues with how our health care system handles them. There are a lot of obstacles that require more attention. Many patients on dialysis require trips to centers for treatments several times per week, and major problems arise when patients don’t have transportation to their treatment centers. When patients can’t get to the center, they fall behind on treatments and don’t receive the critical care they need. Transportation to treatment centers [...]

While I’ve never been diagnosed with it myself, kidney disease has touched just about every facet of my life. At home and at work, I’ve experienced firsthand just how much it can change a person’s life. From the treatments and waiting for a transplant, to the overwhelming financial challenges that can come with it, dialysis brings its own set of difficulties that are hard to fully understand unless you or someone you love is going through it. Kidney disease runs in my husband’s family, so we always knew he may need to go on dialysis. While he did spend time on dialysis [...]

It’s been four and a half years since my first kidney transplant failed after 18 years. For me, that’s meant many of the all-too-familiar challenges of being on dialysis have become part of my day-to-day life once again, including the long and exhausting treatments and all of the other health struggles that come with them. Part of what makes being on dialysis so tough is that it’s often difficult to get the coverage you need. I, for example, have found it difficult to get coverage for dental and eye care, and I know other patients who rely on Medicare to [...]

I’ve seen firsthand why Medigap coverage expansion is needed for dialysis patients, which is the goal of HR 1676, a bill introduced in Congress earlier this year. Since my kidney transplant in 2018, I have gone to dialysis clinics all over to help prepare kidney disease patients for their own transplants. Everywhere I go, I hear from patients struggling to afford the care they need. After a fall from a ladder, I woke up a month later in the hospital and discovered my kidneys had shut down. The attempts to get my kidneys back to normal failed and I was [...]

Dialysis brings a lot of challenges, but one of the biggest is simply getting the coverage you need. The treatments make it very challenging for patients like me to work a traditional job, which means many of us do not have employer-sponsored insurance and rely on Medicare. If it doesn’t cover a specific medication or treatment, we have no choice but to pay out-of-pocket or get an expensive supplementary plan. That could change with a new bill called the Jack Reynolds Memorial Medigap Expansion Act. It would expand Medigap coverage to patients under 65 with end-stage renal disease, meaning more [...]

Starting dialysis seven years ago was a bit of a rude awakening. I had to accept that my day-to-day life had changed, and that I’d now need to devote significant time each week just to go through treatments. One of the most challenging parts of the process, though, was learning the ins and outs of the healthcare system. It was a difficult adjustment, but I’ve been lucky enough to have coverage that takes care of my dialysis treatments and the medications I need. However, I know through my conversations with other patients at my local clinic that the reality is [...]