The President’s vision for healthcare is an affordable, patient-centered system that puts you in control and treats you like a person, not a number.
In the system the President envisions, government rules and incentives don’t stand in the way of a treatment or choice that you and your doctor agree makes sense for you.
As Prepared for Delivery
Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us.
Today, we’re announcing two major steps forward in our efforts to advance American kidney health and deliver on the President’s healthcare vision.
Since President Trump launched his initiative to advance American kidney health last July, we have delivered more action to improve the lives of American kidney patients than we’ve seen in the past several decades combined.
The President’s vision for healthcare is an affordable, patient-centered system that puts you in control and treats you like a person, not a number.
In the system the President envisions, government rules and incentives don’t stand in the way of a treatment or choice that you and your doctor agree makes sense for you.
But under the status quo in kidney care, our rules and government incentives so often do stand in the way of treatment that a patient and his or her doctor might agree makes sense.
That’s why we’re finalizing a new mandatory model in Medicare today, which will enroll about one-third of traditional Medicare beneficiaries with ESRD, about 120,000 patients, in a system that rewards more convenient, comfortable options like home dialysis and incentivizes, rather than discourages, transplants.
Through the Health Resources and Services Administration, we’re significantly expanding support for living organ donation, to include compensation for lost wages, child care, and elder care, because no generous American who wants to save a life by becoming a kidney donor should face barriers to doing so.
Just one of today’s actions alone would do more to advance American kidney health than anything that’s been done in decades. And these are just two of a number of actions we’ve taken on this scale.
We’ve proposed new rules to improve the performance of organ procurement organizations. We’ve launched an optional model to pay physicians for preventing the progression of kidney disease. We’ve issued a request for information to begin exploring more effective ways to use modern IT systems to manage organ allocation and patient and donor data on a national scale, which could be another transformative step in maximizing organ transplants. We’ve made several transformative changes to Medicare payment policies that will reward the development of innovative treatments and devices, which kidney patients have seen too little of for too long.
We announced new guidelines for the donation of organs by Americans with HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C, using scientific advances to start allowing donations that previously would not have been possible. We launched a nationwide kidney risk awareness campaign with the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology.
We’ve made two phases of awards through KidneyX for the Redesign Dialysis Prize, which we’ve been pleased to see drive significant interest from innovators outside the kidney community, and we’re working toward an artificial kidney prize as well. In March, we deployed a new form of portable dialysis machines to New York City to help patients suffering kidney injury from COVID-19. These machines are part of our effort to support new, innovative kidney technologies that are useful in emergency situations and may pave the way for other innovative dialysis options.
To close, I want to highlight one more reason why we’ve put so much of a focus on kidney health. It’s not just because center-based dialysis is one of the most draining procedures in modern medicine, and we believe hundreds of thousands of American patients could benefit from better options. It’s not just because Americans with kidney disease represent more than one in five dollars spent in traditional Medicare, and we don’t have very good outcomes to show for it.
It’s also because kidney care represents maybe the most egregious example of how American healthcare pays for sickness and procedures rather than health and outcomes.
We are paying for and incentivizing center-based dialysis right now. Now, under President Trump’s vision, we will work to delay and prevent the progression of chronic kidney disease. We will work to support and expand home-based dialysis for individuals who do need dialysis, and we will incentivize and expand the market for transplanted organs to ensure that people who need to can progress to the ultimate outcome of a healthy transplantation.
I have seen each of these challenges in kidney care, firsthand, through my father who died from chronic kidney disease in April. I saw the progression of chronic kidney disease; I saw how draining center-based dialysis could be; I saw the relief provided by home-based peritoneal dialysis; and I saw the unbelievable generosity of a living donor who gave him his kidney and enabled him to live many more years as a result. But I also saw the challenges that living donor faced because of bureaucratic rules and restrictions.
When I laid out my vision for value-based transformation of American healthcare two and a half years ago, I said we would use bold new models in Medicare to move us toward a system that paid for outcomes rather than procedures.
We will now have launched such models in kidney care, primary care, emergency transport, and oncology. We’ve also delivered on the other key parts of value-based care that we laid out: price transparency, interoperability of health IT, and regulatory reform.
All of this matters because you get what you pay for. We are now unleashing our system to pay for health, and what we’re going to deliver is much better health for kidney patients and all Americans we serve in the years to come.
With that, I’ll hand things over to Administrator Verma to explain CMS’s actions in more detail.
To learn more about the CMS ETC Model, please visit here
To learn more about the CMS RO Model, please visit here
To learn more about the HRSA rule on living organ donors, please visit here
