Press Release

CMS Removes Equity Requirement from Kidney Transplant Rule Following Do No Harm Comment

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • November 27, 2024

Richmond, VA; November 27, 2024 – The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new rule intended to increase access to kidney transplants. The finalized rule dropped a proposed requirement for hospitals to submit “health equity plans” to receive incentive payments. The change comes after Do No Harm submitted a comment on the original rule stating that the health equity plan requirement would have encouraged race-based discrimination.

Click here to read Do No Harm’s comment and the reporting on the original proposed regulation.

“Racial discrimination has no place in healthcare,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm. “Had the rule taken effect as proposed, the government would have been putting its thumb on the scale by incentivizing providers to consider race when selecting patients for kidney transplants. We are pleased the CMS took our concerns seriously and made the necessary adjustments to the final rule.”

See below for an excerpt from the final rule:

Furthermore, after consideration of the public comments we received, we will not be finalizing a health equity performance adjustment provision, as described in section III.C.5.c(3) of this final rule. Therefore, we are modifying regulatory text for the achievement domain definition at § 512.402, to remove references to a health equity performance adjustment and make minor technical corrections in punctuation.

Last month, Do No Harm released a continuing medical education course that examines the impact of considering race in kidney disease assessments. Click here to take the free course.

Do No Harm, established in April 2022, has rapidly gained recognition and made significant strides in its mission to safeguard healthcare from ideological threats. With 14,000 members, including doctors, nurses, physicians, and concerned citizens across all 50 states and 14 countries, DNH has achieved over 10,000 media hits in top-tier publications and garnered widespread attention through numerous broadcast news appearances.