President Trump takes a stand against deadly but often-forgotten kidney disease | Opinion

President Donald Trump has promised to fight for the forgotten men and women of America — those whose needs and suffering have been too often unheeded by their government. One forgotten group in health care is the millions of Americans with some stage of kidney disease, the ninth-leading cause of death in the nation.

Especially at risk are the more than 700,000 Americans suffering from the final, deadly stage of the disease, kidney failure. That includes 28,000 patients here in Pennsylvania, most of whom must go through the incredibly draining experience of receiving kidney dialysis several times a week, for several hours each time.

To prevent kidney disease and provide more treatment options, we’re launching new ways for Medicare to pay for kidney care. For example, nephrologists will soon be able to receive bonuses for preventing the progress of late-stage kidney disease in patients. We’ll give providers a financial stake in getting their patients healthy, as opposed to just paying them for performing more procedures.

We have also proposed a Medicare initiative to give about half of America’s dialysis providers new incentives to provide patients with dialysis at home or even in their beds at night, rather than having them travel to dialysis centers. Today, only 7.1 percent of kidney patients in Pennsylvania receive dialysis at home, an option that’s much more common in other countries. Home treatment is especially important for individuals and communities struggling to provide for their families — patients who cannot afford to leave their jobs and families several times a week for dialysis.

To provide more kidney transplants, we will be revising how kidneys are obtained from deceased organ donors, allowing better identification of kidneys for transplant. The executive order also calls for us to expand financial support for the generous living donors who choose to donate organs. Changing how we identify transplantable kidneys from deceased donors by itself could produce lifesaving organs for an additional 17,000 Americans each year — including some of the more than 6,000 individuals currently waiting for a kidney in Pennsylvania.

The president’s kidney initiative also includes working with the private sector to develop artificial, implantable kidneys, and continuing support for research into precision-medicine treatments designed to target kidney disease in the populations who are more likely to be genetically predisposed to the disease. We’ll also undertake a national awareness campaign about kidney disease, which is often undiagnosed in its early stages, as breast cancer and prostate cancer once were.

Too often, Washington focuses on some of the same tired fights in health care, year after year — doing nothing for decades to improve how we cover and treat something like kidney disease.

President Trump is shaking that up, and delivering American patients the affordability you need, the options and control you want, and the quality you deserve — especially to patients, like those with kidney disease, who have been forgotten for too long.

Alex M. Azar II is secretary of Health and Human Services.