Posted on 01/20/2011 6:08:36 AM PST by Daffynition
What's wrong with Steve Jobs? Apple won't say. On Monday, the company said he was taking a medical leave—his third since 2004—but refused to disclose why. Yesterday Apple touted its market prospects in a conference call but again said nothing about its CEO's health. You can argue that Jobs' medical privacy is more important than the interests of Apple's investors. But there's another reason why he should tell us what's going on, and it's bigger than money. It's life and death.
Two years ago, Jobs gamed the transplant allocation system to get a liver that could have saved somebody else. At the time, skeptics doubted that he should have received the organ, since he'd been treated for pancreatic cancer—in fact, he may have sought the liver because of the cancer—and the likelihood of the cancer's recurrence made him a bad bet for putting the liver to best use. If his health is now failing because of the cancer, that suspicion may be vindicated.
Jobs lives in Northern California, but he got his liver in Tennessee. Why? Different parts of the country have different waiting lists, and the wait in Northern California was three times longer than the wait in Tennessee. In fact, the median wait in the Tennessee area where Jobs snagged his liver was around 15 percent of the national average. Jobs confirmed last year that this is why he went to Tennessee: "My doctors here advised me to enroll in a transplant program in Memphis, Tennessee, where the supply/demand ratio of livers is more favorable than it is in California here."* Legally, you're allowed to get on multiple waiting lists around the country. That's how you game the system.
So why doesn't everybody do this? [snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
“So, I take it you favor an open market on livers, so that only the people with the most money will get the transplants, instead of everybody having an even chance.”
You’re missing the point. Having a “fair” organ allocation process is pretty useless if 25-50% of transplant recipients die waiting for an organ. The point of compensation is to induce an adequate supply of donated organs. If supply exceeds “demand”/need for organs, then much of the allocation problem goes away. As the Slate article makes clear, the current system already allocates organs to some extent based on willingness/ability to pay. That is, if you need a $200,000 liver transplant, you don’t even get into the line until/unless you should you have the ability to pay for that transplant via insurance, via a charitable fund or your own ability to pay. So I’m not proposing any change in that. I’d simply allow people to get paid to donate.
It turns out the amount needed to induce a sufficient supply of organs is surprisingly small—a few hundred dollars or perhaps $1000 or $2000 to flip someone from being on the fence to being willing to donate. Thus, the added cost to the patient of receiving a paid-for organ is only a tiny amount compared to the cost of the operation itself. So I don’t picture many people being in a situation where they can afford a $200,000 transplant, but can’t scrape up $2,000 more to cover the cost of paying for the organ etc. Read this http://www.aei.org/book/275 if you want to educate yourself.
Imagine how many more livers would be available with the market-based approach.
Or, do you know of any market item that is in consistently short supply?
From my observations, most of them are poor and will always stay poor precisely because they are always doing some stupid ass thing that leads to trouble.
Honest politicians?
Efficient bureaucrats?
Conservative professors?
Intelligent actors?
even worse, if you insurance will pay, they will ONLY pay for you on a list of THEIR choosing.
Excellent post.
Years ago I typed my wife’s nursing school paper on the subject and the same conclusions were valid then (15 years ago) as they are now.
The concept of “fairness” (ugh!) is what is causing the delay of a market-based solution.
One of the reasons some people work very hard to get rich is because life is easier when you’re rich. Money lets you apply brute force to some problems. Why be rich if you can’t buy something you need to save your life, like a body part?
If the guy wants to game the system a little to get himself a liver, I have no problem with it. Besides, I’ve seen organs go to people who seem not to have deserved them, so why not Steve Jobs, who has made enormous contributions to the quality of our lives?
“Waste of a good liver”
Who judges the quality of what Jobs accomplished by gaining an extra 2-3 years of life, and his worth to society?
You?
His payment in cash probably subsidized many additional transplants for the less fortunate and the underfunded stiffed by poor insurance - their costs that the hospital has to swallow.
His business leadership, wealth creation and philanthropy for an extra 3 years added to the quality of more peoples’ lives than an adult who may live an extra 20 years on state welfare.
His experience serves as living research into extending life of pancreatic liver patients.
I own rental property, and I could not agree with you more. Many of the people I deal with have multiple judgements and liens against them and cannot ever own anything of value because it will get taken to pay back the people they have cheated in the past. (I hate when I find this out too late...)
Thanks RK. In part why I posted is the efficacy of good discussion. If people, through this news see the need for more donors, come forward as organ donors. I say, well good.
I hope and pray Jobs makes a full and complete recovery.
He buys it at the supermarket deli like everybody else, silly.
I’m surprised he didn’t order a bunch of scientists to grow one for him using stem cells.
Yeah, I'm just itching to pull in a little extra cash by selling off my liver.
"We're here for your liver!"
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