President Trump on Wednesday announced an executive order on a topic rather far afield from his usual concerns: improving care for patients with kidney disease.
That might seem like an obscure topic, but it's a crucial one. A shortage of kidneys for transplant kills about 43,000 people every year. (Compare that to car accidents, which kill 40,000 people a year, or homicide, which kills fewer than 20,000.) Instead of getting replacement organs for everyone whose kidneys have failed, the current US system relies heavily on dialysis, where machines replace kidney function. Dialysis is usually offered three times a week, for four hours at a time. That means no traveling of any real length, since you have to be close to the machine, and holding down a job is extremely difficult due to the time commitment of dialysis and the exhaustion it causes.
