Where You Live Drives Wait for Liver Transplants
More than 16,000 people are awaiting a liver transplant, and just 6,300 a year get one. More than 1,400 others die waiting each year.
Since 2002, the sickest patients have been ranked atop waiting lists to receive a liver from a deceased donor. They’re given a so-called MELD score, based on laboratory tests, that predicts their risk of death. Rising scores move them up on the waiting list.
Here’s the lingering trouble: Patients with liver failure and would-be donors are not distributed evenly around the country. And the nation is divided into 11 transplant regions that have wide variations in patients and available organs, between regions and within them.
The United Network for Organ Sharing says that in three regions stretching from Ohio down through Tennessee and on to Florida, adults receiving new livers in the past year had median MELD scores of 23 to 24. But in the New York and western Vermont region, liver recipients were far sicker, with a median score of 32. On the region that includes California fared worse, with 37. Within regions, rates of people who die on the waiting list or become too sick to transplant range from fewer than 10 percent to more than 25 percent each year.
Full article on the geographic effect on liver transplants.
Obviously there is no market here. Or if there is a sub rosa market, it is a very imperfect one.
This wouldn’t be a problem if you could pay people for their kidneys.
This should be a no brainer. Let people sell their organs.
I read an article that suggested Apple CEO Steve Jobs was able to get on multiple (regional) organ transplant waiting lists. Supposedly, there wasn’t anything underhanded about this. One requirement was that he be able to arrive very quickly when an organ became available – a jet (or the ability to charter one) allowed him to meet that criteria.
Of course, the medical ethicists worry when affluent people uses their wealth to improve their access to scare health care resources. But allowing people to be compensated for their organs at death would boost the number of available organs by an order of magnitude.
Why wait for death to sell your organs? Why can’t your heirs decide to sell your organs? You could link that with a payoff from Medicare that’s some fraction of your projected lifetime cost to Medicare, with your heirs bidding, low bid gets all.