House move helps dialysis patients

By Phil West, Special to DeSoto Appeal
Wednesday, January 21, 2009

JACKSON -- House members overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday that would spend $1.1 million of the state's reserves so Mississippi Medicaid patients without transportation could get rides to and from their dialysis appointments.

The $1.1 million would come from the state's $365 million rainy day fund, officially the Working Cash-Stabilization Reserve Fund, so 435 dialysis patients could be transported to their life-saving sessions.

"This is an imminent need," said Rep. Steve Holland, D-Plantersville and chairman of the House Public Health and Human Services Committee.

"The alternative to this is, No. 1, death and, No. 2, if they can't get a ride to dialysis, they go into a nursing home at a substantially -- a substantially -- higher cost, a 6-to-1 difference. So that's not very good economics, and it's not very good dignity either."

With Mississippi tax collections falling well below expectations, opponents said they didn't want to chip away at the rainy day fund -- the state's reserves -- and Gov. Haley Barbour last week asked legislators to make the money last at least four years in hopes the economic downturn will have reversed itself by then.

"We're not going to deplete that fund," Holland told fellow House members.

Obtaining dialysis for Medicaid patients is not a problem, but transporting them to and from treatment centers sometimes is difficult, especially for those who live in remote areas, said Gail Sweat, executive director of the Mississippi Kidney Foundation.

The legislation would reinstate transportation services for dialysis patients who had been served under the former category of eligibility known as Poverty Level Aged and Disabled, or PLAD. Those patients lost the transportation services in 2005, Sweat said.

"A few years ago, the dialysis patients were cut out, and when they were cut out it had to be brought to everyone's attention that it's a lifesaving thing. They go in three times a week, four hours a day," Sweat said

The House approval shows the legislature reversing itself, she said, so "they're giving back what people lost."

Мелисса, а вы не знаете по чьей инициативе и как была принята эта программа?