Personal Finance:The dilemma of a failing kidney
Around 2-3 years ago i got spook into thinking that i am going to suffer from a kidney failure. Truth is, like many medical symptoms, many problems exhibits the same symptoms as kidney problems. Why we go to the doctors to diagnose what we are suffering is because they are train to do that, just like how i was train to diagnose what is wrong with the server.
It is only then that i took a hard look at our medical insurance and realise that many of the private H&S insurance Singaporeans have do have coverage for kidney dialysis. The cost coverage for mine is $5000 a month. That might look alot on paper, but do be aware that a patient would need to do dialysis 3 times a week. IT might look sufficient now (is it? are any patients reading this that can validate otherwise?) but factoring rising healthcare cost, this might not be sufficient if your plan does not reimburse on an as-charge basis, which essentially looks a better plan on paper as it factors in rising costs (for a higher premium compare to one without this feature).
Dialysis can be a mental and physical drain that sucks the already depress life out of you. Those who are eligible for transplant would normally wait a long time for a donor. Am i a proponent of organ transplant? perhaps so, if it truly involves saving another person’s life in exchange for monetary gains on the other side. These kind of proper legislation has its good and of course bad side effects. It depends on which outweighs which.
The end result is that if this is not legislated, the minority who really need it suffers, and have to rely on black market and other illegal means to get it. these are essentially law abiding citizens, but force to do this because the institution as a whole don’t see the value of this.
Do read this article to gain more insight about dialysis, kidmey transplant and all:
In February 2007, Garet Hil’s 10-year-old daughter came down with what looked like the flu: a persistent fever, vomiting, dizziness, fainting. On her third trip to the pediatrician, the doctor told the family to take her to the emergency room. There, a blood test delivered frightening news: her kidneys had shut down.
“They put us in an ambulance and rushed her to a nearby hospital that had a pediatric nephrology unit, which put her on dialysis immediately,” recalls Hil. “That saved her life.”
Unfortunately, dialysis also threatened to take over her life. As the long-term treatment for permanent kidney failure, dialysis is a good-news/ bad-news technology. It is life-preserving, but often debilitating and demoralizing—akin to saving polio patients with iron lungs, or treating cancer with never-ending chemotherapy. Dialysis patients are prone to anemia, bloating and weight gain, low blood pressure, and infection from their catheters. They gradually lose the ability to urinate and can drink very little (not very little alcohol—very little anything). Many children on dialysis suffer from stunted growth. Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.
“Yes, it keeps us alive, but this is not what living should be like,” wrote Bill “Epoman” Halcomb, the founder of the patient community at IHateDialysis.com. (Halcomb died in March 2007, after 13 years on dialysis. He was 34.) Dialysis patients typically spend three or four hours hooked up to a machine, three days a week, making work, school, or travel extremely difficult. “Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays I show up around 4:15 in the morning, and I’m on the machine by about 4:30 or so. It’s about 8:00 or 8:15 when I’m out of there,” Henry David, a 60-year-old Los Angeles business owner, explained to me in February. Why start well before dawn? “It’s my choice, because I want to have something of a life.”
The Hils wanted more than “something of a life” for their little girl, who turned out to have a rare genetic disorder called familial juvenile nephronophthisis, which causes the kidneys to develop incapacitating cysts. It has no cure, but one treatment can solve the problem for years, even decades: a kidney transplant.
Unlike dialysis patients, transplant recipients can live normal lives, with few restrictions besides the need for immunosuppressant drugs. Since getting a transplant in late May, David says, “I can eat anything I want to eat. I’ll be able to travel. I don’t need a nap every day. There’s no comparison.” Despite the high price of drugs, transplants overall cost less money—a lot less money—than long-term dialysis.
You might think that such a superior treatment would be standard. But kidneys are hard to come by. In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the “gift of life.” Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year.
[Read more here: The Atlantic >>]
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What is most saddening about this is that we have to depend on the black market for kidneys. It makes one think of how the black market gets these kidneys for these transplants. It’s mainly by kidnapping and stealing kidneys from the victims. Coming back to the topic, I believe one day stem cell research will be able to resolve kidney crisis and we will be able to rid ourselves of the good and bad of dialysis process.