Taxpayer Money Wasted on Keeping people from Dying Horrible Deaths!

Dialysis shortage creates expensive problem for city
By: Katie Worth
Examiner Staff Writer
July 20, 2010

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner (newspaper version, they apparently edited the web page because it sounded a little too heartless)

SAN FRANCISCO — Dialysis centers in The City increasingly exceed capacity, requiring some patients to be hospitalized for days or weeks — often on the public dime — while they wait for a spot at an outpatient clinic to receive the life-saving treatment.

Dialysis is a blood-filtration technique used on patients who face kidney failure. Because more than 100,000 Americans currently need kidney transplants, the wait for a donated organ can take years. In the meantime, patients are treated with dialysis to keep them alive. The typical treatment requires a patient to sit in a clinic for about three hours, three times a week, while their blood is filtered by a machine.

Since the 1970s, each of the clinic’s 13 chairs takes three shifts of dialysis patients. But in recent months, the capacity problem has become so bad that the nursing staff has had to extend the hours of the clinic three days a week to take a fourth patient, and now it’s asking for funding to expand the hours for three more days a week.

When patients need dialysis but there’s no room in the outpatient center, they can end up being hospitalized. Hospitalizing a patient for dialysis can cost taxpayers thousands of dollars a day, whereas receiving the three-hour blood-cleansing treatment costs just hundreds of dollars, according to hospital officials.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner