Forty years ago on October 30, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Social Security
Amendments of 1972 that included Public Law 92–603 authorizing the End Stage Renal
Disease Program under Medicare. 1 The document on which that legislation was passed2
was written in 1967 by the late Dr. Carl Gottschalk, a University of North Carolina faculty
member and President Emeritus of the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), and it was
constructed by the founding fathers of nephrology (Figure 1). This effort harkens back to a …