Biden's health department seeks to push equity requirements on transplant lists

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking to boost fairness requirements for hospitals that offer kidney transplants, according to a recent proposal.

The proposal, announced on May 8, will help President Joe Biden's administration's plan to address “racial bias” when it comes to wait times and “profitability and inequity” at transplant hospitals, Secretary Xavier Becerra said in the press release HHS' proposal it would incentivize hospitals to prioritize low-income patients through a points system and create “health equity” plans to address patient gaps.

“The organ transplant industry, like any other part of society, is not immune to racial inequities,” Becerra said in the press release. “Black Americans disproportionately struggle with life-threatening kidney disease, but receive a lower percentage of kidney transplants. The Biden-Harris administration is taking concrete steps to eliminate racial bias in calculating waiting times and eliminate spirit and inequality in the transplant process.”

If implemented, participating hospitals would be scored annually based on the total number of transplants, acceptance rates and post-transplant success, but a large portion of those points, 60 out of 100, are based on the number the hospital made compared to the government's target, which gives extra weight to low-income patients, according to the proposal.

“Each kidney transplant provided to a patient who meets the low-income definition would be multiplied by 1.2, thereby counting that transplant as 1.2 instead of 1,” the proposal says. “The resulting count of the total number of kidney transplants performed during the PY [performance year]after applying the health equity performance adjustment, it would be compared to the transplant target.”

The rule would also require transplant hospitals to adhere to “additional performance incentives … to improve equity in the transplant process,” according to the news release. One of the requirements would require hospitals to have a health equity plan so they can see “access gaps among populations in their communities.”

“For example, participants could establish programs to educate and support potential living donors from underserved communities or to provide transportation assistance to patients on the waiting list,” the press release says. “Participating transplant hospitals would also have the flexibility to address barriers related to social determinants of health, such as food insecurity and out-of-pocket costs of prescription drugs.”

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, kidney specialist and founder of Do No Harm, he said the Washington Free Beacon that the administration likely wants to avoid saying “We're doing this for black patients,” but that the proposal has the same effect.

“And so I think what they've just decided is, 'We're just going to give hospitals an incentive to do it and we're going to let them know how to do it,'” Goldfarb said. “But I don't know that there's a real system that allow it So either you're going to have a system that ends up being purely based on race, or it's going to be a system that fails completely.”

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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