Trump Administration Proposes Weakening Rules Governing Organ Transplant Centers
The revised rules, proposed this week as part of the agency’s efforts to reduce “burdensome” federal regulations, would no longer penalize hospitals if too many of their patients die following transplants. St. Luke’s in Houston recently lost its Medicare funding for heart transplants for that very reason.
by Mike Hixenbaugh, Houston Chronicle, and Charles Ornstein, ProPublica Sept. 21, 3 p.m. EDT
The Trump administration this week proposed eliminating a decade-old regulation that puts hospitals at risk of losing their Medicare funding if too many of their patients die or suffer organ failure after receiving transplants.
The rule the government is proposing to scrap is the same one that led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to cut off funding last month for heart transplants at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston after an investigation by ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle revealed an outsized number of patient deaths and complications in recent years.
The proposal was unveiled Monday as part of the White House’s push to “cut the red tape” and do away with “burdensome regulation” that officials said put paperwork ahead of patients. In a speech announcing the proposed changes, CMS Administrator Seema Verma said the agency’s existing policies have “put lives in danger.”
“We are proposing to remove those inefficiencies to reduce the amount of time patients have to wait, so that they can begin healing,” Verma said.
The proposal, now subject to public comment and revision before it is finalized, surprised many transplant physicians who have long called for relaxed federal oversight. They’ve argued that the rules requiring that hospitals meet certain survival thresholds for transplants discourage them from taking on risky patients or accepting less-than-perfect organs, lengthening the time patients spend on the waiting list.
Some experts, however, said the proposal would not help patients because it would weaken the government’s authority to hold transplant programs accountable if they fail to provide safe patient care. The regulation was put in place in 2007 after a series of scandals at transplant programs revealed lax federal oversight. Several transplant programs had compiled abysmal patient survival statistics for years while continuing to receive Medicare funding.
more
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-administration-proposes-weakening-rules-governing-organ-transplant-centers
= new reply since forum marked as read
