National Kidney Month: The Value of Innovation
By: Priscilla VanderVeer
This is the third in a series of posts recognizing March as National Kidney Month. You can read the first post here and the second post here.
If you read my other two posts during this year’s National Kidney Month (here and here), you learned about my kidney disease journey, what it took to get where I am today, and all the medicines and medical interventions that made my survival possible.
Today, I want to talk about something that doesn't get nearly enough attention: what survival is actually worth. Because when some economists and governments do the math on the value of innovation, they often get it wrong.
Transplants: a proven investment
It’s tough to argue against the pure economic benefits of kidney transplants.
Before my transplant, I spent years on dialysis – going three times a week for four to five hours at a time, managing life-threatening complications, and requiring significant caregiving support from my family. Medicare spends roughly $90,000 to over $100,000 per dialysis patient every year. Altogether, that adds up to more than $30 billion annually, about 1% of our total federal budget, for a painful treatment that keeps patients alive but rarely helps them thrive.
A functioning transplant changes that math entirely. Every patient with a working kidney transplant represents years of better health, fewer hospitalizations, reduced caregiver burdens, and real savings for the system. The health regained and costs avoided are not a side benefit. They are the whole point of investing in better treatments.
Every patient with a working transplant is proof that investing in innovation pays off. The question is whether we apply that same logic to the next generation of medicine.
New therapies deserve the same logic
New therapies — cell and gene therapies in particular — don't just strive to manage disease. They represent a fundamental shift in what medicine can do. Rather than managing chronic disease indefinitely, these therapies aim to slow, prevent, or even cure it.
That's a fundamentally different kind of value.
And the benefits reach far beyond the patient. Caregivers get their lives back, patients and families experience less financial strain, and the scientific breakthroughs behind one medicine often unlock ideas for the next.
Health economists have names for these benefits:
Caregiver and productivity value: the ripple effect of a patient's improved health on everyone around them
Direct non-medical cost savings: the financial and emotional burden of hospitalizations and complications that never happen
Scientific spillover: the unintended breakthroughs one medicine unlocks in others
These aren't fringe concepts. They're real, measurable, and consequential. But too often, they're left out of the equation.
Outdated analysis has real consequences
Many health economists still rely on cost-effectiveness analysis, also known as CEA, to decide whether a medicine is worth its price. The problem isn't the concept. It's that the models are far too narrow, particularly when applied to medicines.
Insurers use that math to deny coverage or impose high out-of-pocket costs, even for treatments that are genuinely life-changing and even curative. That discourages or even prevents patients from getting treatments that work, which signals to investors and innovators that society doesn't value these medicines.
If we systematically undervalue medicine, we’ll under-invest in future innovation, which means we’ll end up with fewer of the breakthroughs we desperately need. That leaves us all worse off.
Let's stop overlooking elements of value. The transplant that changed my life is proof that investing in innovation pays dividends for patients, for caregivers, for the health care system, and for all of us.
Learn more at https://www.nopatientleftbehind.org/value-of-medicines.