In passing the President’s trade legislation last month, Congress enacted a longtime priority of kidney care advocates: permitting patients with acute kidney injury (AKI) to be treated in dialysis clinics. Under current law, AKI patients may only receive dialysis at hospitals, which is more costly to the Medicare program and less convenient for patients.
Congress took this measure from the Chronic Kidney Disease Improvement in Research and Treatment Act, the comprehensive kidney bill that DPC has supported, so that the Medicare savings could pay for assistance to displaced workers. While DPC does not endorse the use of Medicare savings to offset non Medicare programs, DPC is grateful to Congress for enacting this part of the kidney bill and looks forward to seeing other parts of it passed into law as well.
