Opinion: Reed: Stop ripoff for kidney donors

[Clark]

http://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2016/12/31/reed-stop-ripoff-kidney-donors/96007526/

Opinion: Reed: Stop ripoff for kidney donors

Would you donate one of your kidneys to a friend or relative who would die without one?
What if it could jeopardize your job because some employers won’t grant medical leave for that? Or if it meant insurance companies would deny you life or disability insurance afterward?
Both are possibilities for would-be living organ donors in the United States, which doesn’t seem right.
I know it would cause me to think twice about donating to anyone but an immediate family member who was in immediate danger of dying.
And that’s a sick situation to the National Kidney Foundation of Florida, a Brevard County-based group dedicated to raising money and awareness for the prevention and treatment of disease.
The Foundation is supporting a bipartisan bill in Congress called the Living Donor Protection Act. Congressman Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, is among the cosponsors.
“It'll help untangle the insurance and financial mess that our patients and donors go through,” said Phil Salick, who donated a kidney to his twin brother, Rich Salick, in the 1970s, and then co-founded the charity surf festival with him. “I know about the mess.” (Rich Salick died in 2012 at the age of 62.)
If passed, the bill would do three things:
• Prohibit discrimination against living organ donors in the availability, price, coverage or cancellation of life insurance, disability insurance or long-term care insurance.
• Amend the Family and Medical Leave Act to specifically cover living organ donation as a “serious health condition” that entitles donors to leave.
• Order the Department of Health and Human Services to publicize the changes.
“It’s a very safe surgery today for the donors, as far as long-term complications,” said Bill Hahn, a kidney recipient who now chairs the Kidney Walk on Cocoa Beach. “It’s really done in a single-site laparoscopic surgery, where there’s one incision and the tools go right in through your belly button. The hospital stay and leave for most patients have been cut down five-fold.”
Yet a survey by the Organization for Transplant Professionals found that 39 percent of its member centers had eligible donors decline due to fear of future insurance problems.
It’s a reasonable fear.
A federally funded study of 1,000 people who donated kidneys at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore found that 34 percent of those who did so between 2005 and 2011 reported difficulty obtaining life insurance afterward.
Another 6 percent of donors reported difficulty getting health insurance afterward. But that problem was solved by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (better known as Obamacare) which banned health insurers from considering “pre-existing conditions.”
If Republicans including Posey are serious about repealing and replacing Obamacare, there’s one protection they should hurry up and replace.
“Most donors will underestimate the potential financial impact of donation,” says a report by the Organization for Transplant Professionals. “For donors of modest means, out-of-pocket expenses such as travel costs to the transplant center … prescription drug cost and unpaid leave from work are all significant potential factors in post-operative financial stress.”
Does the insurance industry really need to keep sticking it to these life-savers for years afterward?
No. And I say that from an insurer’s point of view.
During the debate over Obamacare, executives at companies such as Blue Cross and Health First told me it was past time for the industry as a whole to quit dropping coverage for people who get sick and to quit denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
Everyone was willing to cover those people again, although it would nudge rates upward for all policyholders. But no company would do so on its own for fear of losing policyholders to lower-cost competitors.
Insurers didn’t want to be evil, but were stuck, economically. So, they supported a law that forced everyone to change at the same time.
Congress and this president (or the next one) can take the same step with organ donations and other types of insurance and patient protection.
Business will live. And so will thousands more Americans awaiting transplants.