Government Waste, an Up-Close Look

As irony would have it, on the same day that I opened the letter from the IRS, I called Kaiser's peritoneal dialysis clinic to see if I could have Aaron return the unopened supplies so that someone else could use them or so they could be used for training new patients. I was told that I would have to destroy the supplies, that they could not be used by others. I called Baxter, the supply company, and was told the same thing. Baxter said that a driver could pick up the boxes on Jan. 6, but that Baxter would not reroute them. I told the clerk to forget it, I wanted to get rid of the stuff ASAP so that I could be done with my bedroom as a warehouse and get back to my bedroom as a bedroom.

The reason this is ironic is that every dialysis patient in the country, as of 1984, is on Medicare, regardless of age. If you're 2 years old and are on dialysis, you receive Medicare. Here one arm of the government is attempting to take my money, and another arm of the government refuses to allow me to save it money.

And we're not talking about chump change here. Every night for the past 22 months, I used three bags of dialysate at $75 a pop, or $225 in solution alone. I had approximately 30 unopened solution boxes, approximately $4,500! Add to that the fancy, single-use cassettes with tubing to each bag, to me, and to the drain jug, and the unopened extension lines that allowed me to move more than 12 feet from my machine, and the unopened box of 100 iodine-tipped mini-caps that seal the end of the transfer set each morning, and you can see we're approaching five grand, stuffed under my bed and stacked high against the walls of my bedroom.

The only saving grace is that Ed, the friend who came over to help with the destruction, is a resourceful guy who could use some of the tubing, the drain jug, and a few of the very sturdy dialysate boxes. Also, the Baxter rep said the dialysate makes excellent fertilizer, so Aaron emptied a half dozen bags on my neighbor Janet's garden. The rest of the boxes, cassettes, and extension lines were recycled, but four large trash bags with the empty dialysate bags were tossed in the garbage.

I'm sure it all comes down to liability. Seems that's the case in 95 percent of decisions made in this country. Even though the dialysate did not expire for at least another year, even though it had been kept at a consistent temperature that was well within the established guidelines for safe keeping, even though I was willing to have Aaron and Ed do the heavy lifting and return the supplies at no charge to Medicare or the dialysis clinic, I suppose there is the FEAR that I would have opened the boxes, injected some dire substance into the bags, and resealed them again in an evil scheme to take down some luckless souls. Unbelievable.

What's more unbelievable is that with budget cuts, we could easily see a tightening of access to healthcare. Dialysis is an extremely expensive venture, one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, Medicare costs. Costs driven up by this kind of waste. But when the Government Accounting Office (GAO) or Congress looks at the numbers, they won't see this ridiculous situation. They'll only see that dialysis patients are costing the country an arm and a leg, and that perhaps we should go the way of South Africa or Australia. The former has death panels as was once the case in this country, at which patients must prove their social worth in order to receive dialysis. Otherwise, they're left to die. In Australia, patients over 65 are not given dialysis, but are rather told by their physicians that they are too old to be viable.

What a crazy, mixed-up country we live in! How did things get so incredibly out of whack?