California Statewide News

The below is taken from a February 28, 2018 Patients and Caregivers to Protect Dialysis Patients press release:

SACRAMENTO - A broad coalition of doctors, nurses, patients, caregivers, veterans, and other health care providers announced today it plans to fight on behalf of California dialysis patients to oppose the deeply-flawed dialysis ballot measure likely on the November 2018 California statewide ballot.
 
Patients and Caregivers to Protect Dialysis Patients will lead opposition to the ballot initiative being bankrolled by the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) union. The proposition sets new, arbitrary limits on what insurance companies pay for dialysis care. In doing so, the initiative would dangerously reduce access to care for Californians with kidney failure who need dialysis treatments three days a week, three to four hours at a time, to survive. Missing even one dialysis treatment increases the risk of patient mortality by 30 percent.
 
At a time when the number of Californians needing dialysis is increasing by about five percent per year and patients already have difficulty finding dialysis clinics close to home, this measure would result in clinic cutbacks and even closures, jeopardizing access to care. The initiative itself is an abuse of  California’s ballot measure process as UHW is using it as part of a broader corporate campaign against the dialysis provider community. The union is seeking to organize dialysis workers and has so far been unsuccessful.
 
 Dr. Bryan Wong, a practicing kidney doctor in the East Bay as well as Board member and past president of the California Dialysis Council, which represents hundreds of dialysis clinics throughout California said: “UHW is using the threat of a terrible ballot initiative to try to force dialysis providers into complying with their union organizing demands. While a union has every right to try to organize workers, it is wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous for UHW to use patients as pawns in this endeavor.”
 
The UHW initiative limits what insurance companies pay to dialysis clinics for patient treatments. The limits require community dialysis clinics to issue annual rebates to private health insurance companies if any charge exceeds 115 percent of so-called “patient care services costs.” And yet, nothing in the initiative requires insurance companies to pass even one dollar of these rebates on to consumers. The proposition’s definition of “patient care services costs” does not cover the actual cost of providing care at a clinic and excludes many necessary costs —including  those important to patient care such as the physician medical director and the nurse clinical coordinator. If necessary dialysis clinic costs aren’t accounted for, clinics will be forced to cut back services or close, leaving patients with limited options for getting life-saving dialysis care.
 
As dialysis clinics shut down, more patients will seek treatment in the more expensive hospital setting or suffer severe complications from missing treatments, ending up in hospital emergency rooms. That means more ER and hospital overcrowding, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in higher costs for Medi-Cal and Medicare to treat dialysis patients – and higher costs for taxpayers.
 
Care in California dialysis clinics consistently beats the national average. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, on average California outperforms the rest of the nation on quality of care and patient satisfaction.