“liver transplant could have cured her”
It isn’t just the cost of the transplant...but the lifetime costs of the antirejection meds, the steroids, the hospitalizations needed when the immune suppressants allow infections, particularly fungal infections to take root that really make transplants very expensive. The 3 year mortality rates are 22 per cent(survival rate is 78 per cent)! Survival rates out to 18 years post is up to 60 per cent...though folks getting out to beyond 10 before dying may have succommed to other causes. For Example, a 50 something liver transplant patient may die of cardiac issues before reaching his 18th survival year, not related to his transplant. So the 40 per cent mortality rate by the 18th year may have to be viewed with a grain of salt.
The point is, Transplantations are very costly with the total lifetime costs being many times the actual cost of the transplant. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be done but they need to find ways of bringing down the total costs or else only the very rich can pay for them. That’s why I view organ donation very cynically...oh give “the gift of life” the advertisements urge, do it “for free!”, only the doctors and hospitals will profit handsomely from some brain dead suckers “free liver” while his widow gets nothing but the lingering hospital bills.
I think a movement needs to be started serving notice that the families of organ donators get promised a percentage of the gross profits that will be made on the transplantation of their loved ones’ organs or else no donations will be made. Offering a profit incentive may do better to increase the supply than advertisements that play on guilt...especially since most of the organs will go to those with the best insurance or have the means to pay for them. A threat to boycott organ donations (or a well publicized movement aimed to reduce organ supply until a system is in place to make sure that all who need an organ can get one regardless of the ability to pay) will get the elites’ attention.
Families of organ donators need to be paid since it is the rich or well to do who mostly get the best chance at getting organs anyway. None of this “guilt” stuff!...pay the families of organ donators or ban all transplants!
The technology really has never been ready for ‘prime time” anyway. Stem Cell research with one’s own healthy organs grown from them looks promising but by the time that such organs would be ‘ready” one may have already died.
This is sick. Setting up the sale of a heart or liver to pay for the widow's retirement is not moral or ethical. Why did I immediately think of, "Get thee behind me Satan?"