Tag Archives: dialysis

ProPublica Investigates Dialysis: For-Profit Providers Flourish as Care Quality Flounders

A great in-depth look by my ProPublica colleague Robin Fields into the dialysis industry. It was a field I was barely familiar with, as only about 400,000 Americans are on dialysis, but the entitlement as grown from $135 million to $20 billion annually, with mixed and depressing results.

I took this photo of a woman whose mother nearly bled to death after being improperly hooked up to a dialysis machine.

Cathleen Sharkey holds a frame of photographs of her mother, Barbara Scott, whose bloodline became disconnected during a dialysis treatment at Dutchess Dialysis Center. Scott never fully recovered and died shortly after of heart failure. (Dan Nguyen/ProPublica)