Dialysis Patients Face Certain Death Sentence

Last week I wrote about the situation of the Grady dialysis clinic which the Grady Board voted to close last week. This means certain death for patients treated there without insurance as the private dialysis clinics won’t treat the patients, and emergency rooms will only treat them if they are within two days of death (see “I Need the Dialysis. I Think I will Die.”) This struck some of us in the healing professions as particularly cruel and inhumane, and some of our readers from other countries said we didn’t have the right to call ourselves a civilization if we treated people like that. The 90 or so patients represent a mix of undocumented aliens, people waiting for their green cards, and those who haven’t lived in Georgia for five years and don’t qualify for Medicaid. So far efforts to get private clinics and local teaching hospitals to provide compasionate care have been to no avail.

Last Wednesday local attorney Lindsay Jones, working pro bono, was able to get a court injunction to keep the clinic open. Last Friday the local AJC did some slam dash journalism by picking up the phone and getting someone from the New Jersey Medicaid department who said that they did not provide care for undocumented aliens, in spite of what a spokesman for Grady said. His response was “Nah-ah”.

Tomorrow there is a court date at Fulton County court on Central Ave between Prior and Martin Luther King Blvd in downtown Atlanta. There will be a protest at 8:15 am on the courthouse steps.

This afternoon we met with the lawyer and the dialysis patients.

Neil Shulman MD discusses situation with dialysis patients

I spoke with a woman from Nigeria named Ade Abner. She is 43 years old and has been on dialysis for 10 years. She is married to an American who was born in Georgia who is also on dialysis. She works as a registered nurse and is waiting for a green card. She is therefore not an undocumented alien.

Ade Abner
Some of the patients from Mexico said that some people had already gone back to Mexico. The Mexican Consulate, who Grady has been working with, told one woman that she had to leave now or she wouldn’t be able to return later. Feeling pressured to leave she went back. One woman went to Birmingham AL and is currently getting dialyzed in an ER. Others had been offered $2,000 to go back to Mexico, where they would be dialyzed for only three months.