A strong motivation to produce Abundant is rooted in the desire to help the kidney transplant community. Initial contact begins with staggering national statistics which instantly establish an enormous epidemic scale of the problem.

• Roughly 128,000 Americans begin dialysis each year.
• Roughly 39,000 Americans are added to the kidney wait list each year.
• More than 90,000 Americans are on the waitlist for a kidney transplant.
• More than 500,000 Americans are on dialysis.

Despite those figures:

• Only about 26,000 kidney transplants are performed each year.
• About 20,000 kidney donations are deceased donations each year
• About 6,000 kidney donations are living donations each year.

As a result:

• The federal government says about 13 people on the kidney wait list die each day waiting on a kidney that never arrives.
• Economists who study kidney donation and transplant say the true number of Americans who die from the kidney shortage is about 110 per day and exceeds 40,000 each year.
• Economists advocating for financial compensation of kidney donors point out that the value of a kidney transplant to a patient on the kidney waitlist is $1,100,000 and taxpayers save $400,000 every time a kidney transplant is performed.

A complicated and difficult healthcare system for kidney transplant strikes a contrast tothe urgency of those enormous statistics.  With more than 150 transplant centers, 52 organ procurement organizations and hundreds of transplant surgeons all affecting the process of giving or receiving a kidney donation, there is no short answer that is easily communicated to the public on how to receive or donate a kidney.  A result of this status quo is economic and racial stratifications in healthcare which create a racial disparity in kidney transplant.  For example, statistics show that a white person is 4X more likely to receive a kidney transplant than a Black person.

From a financial perspective, Medicare covers the cost of dialysis. When this entitlement was established in 1972, roughly 10,000 people were on dialysis treatment.  In 2020, more than 500,000 Americans were on dialysis.  And in 2018 Total Medicare-related expenditures for beneficiaries with kidney failure rose to $49.2B.