Dialysis patients in limbo

February 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

ATLANTA (AP) — Before she started receiving dialysis treatments at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, Bineet Kaur was so sick from kidney failure she could hardly walk. The memories of that pain came flooding back in September, when she received a letter saying the clinic was closing.

The treatment typically costs $40,000 to $50,000 a year, and Grady is just one of the struggling public hospitals cutting the service to reduce costs. Many indigent dialysis patients, including Kaur, are illegal immigrants, so facilities that give them routine treatments receive no federal money for their care.

Since the clinic closed in October, Kaur and other former clinic patients have been getting private dialysis treatments funded by Grady, which is struggling to find new providers for them and has even offered to buy them plane tickets to their home countries.

New patients who show up in Grady’s emergency room in need of dialysis will get it only in life-or-death situations, and after they improve will be told that they must go elsewhere for regular care.

Kaur, a bubbly 26-year-old who studied nursing and once did an internship at Grady, said she doesn’t know where she will get the treatment she needs to survive.

“I really hope God helps,” the Indian native said on a recent morning. “Otherwise, it’s like having a death sentence.”

Public hospitals are often the only option for illegal immigrants and others without health insurance because they will treat anyone. But many of those hospitals have severe funding problems, and several have given up dialysis treatment to control costs. Grady officials say its clinic was losing $2 million to $4 million a year.

Jackson Health System, the public hospital in Miami-Dade County, stopped paying for outpatient dialysis treatment for 175 indigent patients Dec. 31. A month later, 40 patients — about half of them illegal immigrants — were still looking for alternate treatment. The hospital said it expects to save more than $4 million a year by stopping the payments.