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 [...]