A Rollins School of Public Health student hosted a discussion Friday to formulate a means to save several uninsured Grady Hospital dialysis patients’ lives, who will not receive care after January 3 due to the hospital’s decision to close its dialysis center.

Grady is currently the only hospital in the region to provide care to the uninsured.

“I will send a formal letter of request to the powers that be at Emory,” with more than 100 signatures to encourage the administration to take a stance on the issue, Rollins first-year graduate student Roger Sikes, who hosted the event, said.

Sikes hopes Emory will decide to be an exemplary community member by taking on even one of the uninsured dialysis patients free of charge.

Dialysis is a treatment prescribed for kidney disease. The treatment acts like a working kidney by cleaning contaminants from the bloodstream that would otherwise accumulate and eventually kill the patient.

Following a September legal battle, Grady agreed to pay for private providers to treat the patients for an additional three months after the center closed.

The patients have been given three options, Sikes said: They can move to a state with more lenient Medicaid requirements, return to their country of origin if they are immigrants or receive dialysis care from Grady on an emergency basis.

Grady’s dialysis center was treating 90 uninsured patients — 60 of which were undocumented immigrants. About 30 of these patients will have nowhere to receive care when their three months of additional treatment end, Sikes said.

Two years ago, Grady was on the verge of collapse when it was unable to pay back over $100 million of debt. Following the crisis, the hospital reorganized and is now run by a corporate nonprofit board.

“Grady tends to make everything an issue of money,” Sikes said.

He claims that Grady thinks that health care given to the uninsured free of charge will cause the uninsured, especially undocumented immigrants, to flock to the Grady health-care system.

Associate Professor of Medicine Neil Shulman purported that illegal immigrants are not coming to the United States for free health care.

“If you want free care, you go to Canada or Europe, not America,” he said.

Sikes said it is important not to forget the human element of the Grady dialysis crisis.

“We also need to take things like compassion into account,” when making life or death decisions, Sikes said. “We can’t just monetize people.”

Grady is unaware of where these patients will be going or what will happen to them, Sikes said.

First-year Rollins graduate student Haley Stolp said, “It’s terrifying. They’ll go off to Mexico and you’ll never hear of them again.”

Stolp said Emory students need to get involved.

“Students have the power. That’s our strongest hand,” she said.

Sikes suggested pressuring private dialysis providers in the Atlanta area to take one patient each pro bono, citing that some dialysis providers, such as DaVita, already provide some pro bono work, but have been unwilling to disclose how much free care they provide.

“The bottom line is doing whatever it takes to keep these people alive,” Shulman said.

— Contact Matthew Tamul.