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America’s Antiquated Kidney Care System Illustrates Terribleness Of Single Payer

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Earlier this month, President Trump signed another executive order on health care, this one related to the treatment of patients with kidney disease. The administration estimates the measures will ultimately save billions of taxpayer dollars, and up to 28,000 lives per year.

Critics highlighted that Trump’s order relies upon authorities in Obamacare to reform the kidney care system, even as his administration argues that federal courts should strike down the entire law. But these critics omitted another, even greater irony: At a time the left wants to create a single-payer health care system, the deplorable condition of kidney care in this country—with high death rates, and patients unnecessarily suffering because they continue to receive outdated and inefficient treatments—illustrates perfectly all the flaws of government-run health care.

Health Care ‘Innovation,’ Circa 1973

Various stories discussing Trump’s executive action contain numerous nuggets proving the need for the transformation of kidney care in the United States:

  • Only 12 percent of American patients undergo dialysis at home, compared to 80 percent in Hong Kong. Even Guatemala has a 56 percent in-home dialysis rate.
  • A total of $114 billion in federal spending, just to treat this one condition.
  • Half of the patients who undergo dialysis die within five years.
  • We’re currently using “Decades-old models of care,” as described by one kidney care administrator: “The last 30 years as a country all we’ve done is wait for kidneys to fail and we put people on dialysis.”

As Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose father received a transplanted kidney five years ago, noted in a speech in March: “One of the key reasons for our failing policies is that kidney care in particular has some of the worst incentives in American health care.”

Why does kidney care have some of the worst incentives in a health care system plagued with all sorts of perverse disincentives? Even Vox stumbled across the truth in an article on the issue: “Medicare has covered all end-stage kidney disease treatment since 1973.”

Because Medicare provides full coverage for most kidney care patients, providers have very little incentive to innovate. The two largest dialysis providers—DaVita and Fresenius—get paid more for providing care in clinics rather than at home. As a result, American patients (as opposed to patients in other countries) must endure the hardship of taking hours out of their day several times per week to go to dialysis clinics, rather than receiving the treatment in the comfort of their home while they sleep.

Private insurers—those with the evil “profits” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–VT) decries—would have had a reason to divert patients to in-home dialysis decades ago. Patients would receive better care, as a result of which both insurers and patients would save money.

But because dialysis providers have little qualms charging the federal government beaucoup bucks for substandard care, and because the federal government does not adapt nearly as quickly to new care models as the private sector, kidney patients—and taxpayers—have suffered. It’s but another example of how government-run health care inflicts its greatest harms on the most vulnerable patients.

Health Care Run by Bureaucrats

The Trump administration’s executive order envisions new delivery models for kidney care proposed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). As noted above, some pointed out that Obamacare created CMMI, meaning that if federal courts strike down all of the law, the authority to implement these changes would disappear.

The critics ignore one key fact: Congress enacted Obamacare into law nearly a decade ago—yet neither Congress nor CMMI took action on kidney care issues until this point:

The fact that it took a self-proclaimed “innovation” center nearly a decade to propose reforms to kidney care reinforces the inability to change within the entire federal health care bureaucracy. Just before Obamacare’s enactment, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), then-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, called officials within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “hidebound, not very creative, a crank-turning bunch of folks.”

The lack of progress on kidney care for so many years reinforces the accuracy of Baucus’ assessment. Yet the left wants to empower these same “hidebound” bureaucrats with authority not just over Medicare, but all Americans’ health care treatments.

Note to American patients: If you want the best health care money could buy as of 1973—the year when Medicare began coverage of end-stage renal disease—then you’ll love single-payer health care. If, on the other hand, you prefer access to modern, 21st-century medicine, then you might want to stick with another type of health care system—one run by doctors and patients rather than government bureaucrats.