Posted on 06/12/2013 4:24:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last week, a federal judge ordered Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to be moved to the adult lung transplant list. That gives her a better chance of receiving a potentially lifesaving transplant. Sarah Murnaghan's fate should force us to examine our organ transplant policy.
There are more than 88,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Roughly 10 percent of them will die before receiving an organ. These lost lives are not so much an act of God as they are an act of Congress because of its 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, as amended, which prohibits payment to organ donors.
Reliance on voluntary donations has been an abject policy failure. The mindless rhetoric used to support this policy is: "Organ transplantation is built upon altruism and public trust." It's noteworthy that everyone involved in the organ transplant business is compensated -- that includes hospitals, surgeons, nurses and organ procurement workers. Depending on the organ transplanted, the charges range from a low of $260,000 for a kidney to about a million dollars for a heart or intestines.
Many people are offended by the notion of human body parts becoming commodities for sale. There's at least a tiny bit of inconsistency because people do sell human blood, semen and hair. But let's think through the prohibition on organ sales by asking the question: How many other vital things in our lives do we depend on donations to provide? Food is vital, water is vital; so are cars, clothing, housing, electricity and oil. We don't depend on donations to provide these goods. Just ask yourself whether having a car, clothing or a house should be determined by the same principle governing organ transplants: "altruism and public trust." If it were, there would be massive shortages.
Why should people have to depend on altruism and voluntary donations to provide something that one day they may need more urgently than food, water, cars, clothing or housing? All objections to organ sales reduce to nonsense, ignorance or arrogance. Let's look at some of them.
One argument is that if organs are sold rather than donated, poor people couldn't afford them. This argument ignores the difference between methods of attaining organs and methods of distributing them. For example, poor people might not be able to afford food, but Congress hasn't mandated that food be donated instead of sold so that poor people can eat. If Congress did that, there'd be massive shortages, and poor people would probably starve. So instead of relying on "altruism and public trust" to feed poor people, we simply allow the market mechanism to supply food and then subsidize purchases through programs like food stamps. The same principle can be applied to organ transplants: Allow the market to supply organs, and if needed, subsidize or provide them through charity.
Another stated concern is that if there's a market for organs, poor people will sell their organs and become ill. From an ethical point of view, if people own themselves, they should have a right to dispose of themselves any way they please so long as they do not violate the property rights of others. Of course, if people belong to the government, they have no such right. By the way, most proposals for organ sales are only for cadaver organs.
Some people have argued that an organ transplant market might lead to murder and the sale of the victim's organs to unscrupulous organ brokers. There are many market transactions that can be abused, such as stock market fraud and product misrepresentation, but we haven't chosen to outlaw the sale of stock and other products. Murder would remain illegal and punishable.
Finally, there's the humane question. If you or a loved one were in dire need of a lifesaving kidney or lung transplant, which would you prefer: being placed on an organ transplant waiting list, or having the right to sell assets or take out a loan to purchase an organ?
Alternatively, perhaps defective organs make people defective and therefore should be allowed to die
So the only person in the US with ownership of/control over their own body is a pregnant woman intent on killing her unborn baby.
Everybody involved in the organ donation process is compensated except the donor and their family. I think at the very least all medical bills leading up to the donation that are incurred by the now deceased donor and family should be waived........
This government’s attitude in general is that of Ebenzer Scrooge: “If they be like to die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”
Organ transplant overseeing group is meeting to reexamine its criteria in light of these court rulings.
The disrespect for the sanctity of human life is widespread.
I wanted to respond to that post but just couldn’t. I don’t disagree that the “law of the wild” is such that the “defective” don’t survive, but being human means we are capable of empathy and love. It means that we can find it in our hearts to help someone when they need a hand. This girl isn’t asking for a handout, she’s just asking to be allowed to be part of an adult donor list, something the doctors even approved.
We’re not yet to the point where society has regressed to the “law of the wild,” and as such, everyone who can have a fighting chance should.
‘Some will live and some will die’-Sebelius
The new Democrat mantra.
So the gubment can decide who lives and who dies.
I always knew that while he is a very bright fellow, there was something critical lacking at the core of Walter Williams' philosophy. This paragraph betrays what it is. In fact, we belong neither to the government, nor to ourselves. We belong to God.
So what’s Walter Williams’ solution? Kidneys on e-bay? Also I think only kidneys can come from a living donor. So is he advocating a world where a deceased person’s next-of-kin auction off his or her body parts before the corpse grows cold, just so they can make a few bucks off the dearly departed? Would they be able to do that without consideration of the feelings of the donor? It’s not a perfect system that we have. People do die waiting for donors. But I doubt that Wally’s scheme of body parts to the highest bidder won’t do anything to improve the percentages, and might well lower them
If the government doesn't give it to those "in need" it gives them the money to buy it with.
This the most disgusting article on transplants that I have ever seen. I talk with hundred of lung patients every day that a transplant is their only hope. A bilateral tx cost at least a million, with 20000 up front. I know one person where a misspent letter set them back over 10,000.And, then there is the rejection factor which might require another transplant at any time. Only the very rich or very poor under Williams plan would have a second chance at life. But, I suppose one could become a criminal in prison and get new lungs for free.
I know someone who needs lungs. She is a single mother of 4 yo twins. So, who is more deserving?
Is she on the donor list? I’m not advocating this little girl get bumped to the front of the line. I’m advocating that she be permitted to get on the adult list. That’s all.
I under stand your point. Roughly half of those on the list will die waiting for lungs. There is just no fair way to do this.
But the point of a separate list was survivability, right?
If you have a limited supply, you aren’t just deciding WHO gets a lung, you are really deciding what the best use of the lung is, which you could measure for example based on lung expectancy.
Making up numbers:
If a 25-year-old will get 40 good years out of a lung, while a 10-year-old on average would only get 5 (because of increased rejection problems, etc.), then giving one 25-year-old a lung is the same as giving 8 10-year-olds lungs.
If we are going to say having 8 people live 5 years longer is better than having 1 person live 40 years longer, then we are really saying that we should kill a few healthy people each week, since one dead person can provide organs for 6-12 people to continue living.
There really isn’t a shortage of organs, so much as there is a shortage of people who are willing to donate organs.
Let’s look at two classes of organ donations, those that can be done by the living, and those that are terminal. I ignore the replaceable donations like hair, blood, and bone marrow.
Asking a living person to donate an organ is asking them to gamble years of their life against years of another life. Obviously, their life may not be impacted at all, or it might be severely curtailed, based on circumstances they can’t possibly know. I could donate one kidney, and then the next day have a car accident and have my remaining kidney damaged.
My guess is most of those donations are within family, where there is a personal attachment bringing people to take that risk. Here, money could provide a different incentive, but it is almost certain that the “burden” of donations would be borne almost entirely by poor people. Rich people want to enjoy the money they have, not get a little bit more by risking their lives.
So, offering money for these organs would be like paying poor people for their lives, to help rich people who are more likely to be able to afford it. And if you actually allow market-based activity (as opposed to government setting a fixed-fee system), then you definitely are going to get into bidding wars, and the rich will get the organs from the poor.
For the dead donors, you’d have to have some sort of fixed price system, because those donors would have to make a decision before they were at death’s door; you couldn’t let “next of kin” decide, you’d need to see what a will stated to see who gets the property of the dying person, because THAT would be the person who would “own” the organs, not necessarily a wife or child. In fact, it could greatly complicate wills, as right now a spouse CAN decide whether to let someone die or not, and decide to donate the organs, but if there was money involved, you’d need to go through probate, with no time to do so.
In my next post, I’ll deal with another problem with this idea of paying for organs. This summary is: if we want more organs, we need to work harder at getting people to agree to donate their organs. They will be dead anyway, so it really shouldn’t bother them. But many people I know are scared because the medical community can’t be trusted not to kill them to get their organs.
An interesting fact. In 2008, the total number of transplants for all organs in the United States was 23,288. We are talking a very small number here.
Now, we want to know the number of people who were WAITING for a transplant. One source says 100,000; that source also says 12 people die each day while on that list. You could presume that each day, 63 people on the list received transplants, so 75 people come off the list each day, and most of them get transplants.
For the sake of argument, I’m going to use those numbers. They might not be correct, but the FORM of the argument will be accurate.
So, each day we have 75 people on this list. 63 get organs that were donated, and 12 die because they have no donor.
What happens if we start paying for organs? Let’s assume that we can get 12 more organs a day if we pay $25,000 for the organ. Again, I make that number up. So at first glance, we need to spend an additional $300,000 a day, and for that price, we get to save 12 lives, which looks like $25,000 per life. A good bargain.
EXCEPT, we will have to pay for ALL the organs. So it’s not 12x$25,000, it is 75x$25,000. That’s $1,875,000 a day. For that value, we save 12 more lives, so the cost of each life saved is NOT $25,000, but $156,200.
Now, maybe that is still a reasonable cost. But do we have millions of dollars a day to spend?
When people talk about paying for organs, they always act as if the cost is low since there are only small numbers of additional organs needed.
Imagine what would happen if you started PAYING for regular blood? There are some who argue for this, but millions of gallons of blood are donated for free, and you could bankrupt the medical system if you paid for all that free blood, just to get a marginal additional amount of blood.
I know there are payments for processed blood. That is more a payment for time though, not the blood. You get paid because you have to sit an hour for the process.
And yes, people pay for semen — but that is not needed for medical healing purposes, so it is OK that there be a “market” for it.
BTW, there is one more fear, that you might actually end up with FEWER organs if you established a pay service. A LOT of people donate their organs out of an altruistic sense of duty. If they find out people are getting paid for it, they might, instead of deciding to take the money, decide that they aren’t participating in the capitalistic process, figuring that now that there is a market, the market will take care of it.
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