Will girl's transplant hurt the system?

Politico ^ | 06/13/2013 | Brett Norman

[SeekAndFind]

The campaign to move a dying 10-year-old onto the waiting list for adult lungs has succeeded: Wednesday afternoon Sarah Murnaghan underwent transplant surgery in Philadelphia and she has a good chance at a longer life.

What may never be known is who may have suffered in her stead. When one person moves up an organ transplant waiting list, another person may move down

If all goes well, the young cystic fibrosis patient will get a fresh start on childhood, able to spend time with friends, play sports and do other normal kid things, Samuel Goldfarb, her doctor at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said during a court hearing last week.

But as everyone hopes for the best for Sarah and her family, the match comes after a media campaign, a lawsuit and a federal court order, not to mention pressure from lawmakers on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to personally intervene on behalf of a single child. It has experts from the transplant community worried about a precedent with the potential to open up the system to tampering from the outside. And that could begin chipping away at the careful framework set up to fairly distribute donated organs, the most precious — and scarce — resources in the health care system.

“If the distribution of organs becomes subject to the success of individual publicity campaigns, with organs going to those who hire the best PR firms and lawyers, who on the waiting list would remain confident that their priority would be decided on the merits?” Daniel Wikler, a medical ethics expert at Harvard, said in an email.

“And who would agree to donate organs to a system supposedly based on rational, humane, and fair selection criteria but that would actually be determined by the assets of the highest bidder?”

[okie01]

The rules about who gets transplants should be *guidelines,* not hard and fast rules that don’t take individual circumstances into account.

You're correct, of course. But there is a reason for "hard and fast rules" -- they are less subject to litigation.

A doctor or administrator who practices discretion in life and death matters such as these is leaving himself wide open to a legal challenge that he committed a "mistake". In a "judgment call", the attorney's judgment is equal to the professional's judgment -- under the law.

It's the same reason many schools practice "zero tolerance". Once they make a judgment call, little Johnny's parents are going to bring suit.

The substitution of "hard and fast rules" for what should be guidelines is the price of a litigious society.

[CodeToad]

“speak. However she probably should have been in that line all along and they simply righted a wrong by allowing her to jump in where she probably would have been all along. “

That’s my exact point. She was pushed out of line and had to fight to get back in it. This is the type of crap the government has already been doing with healthcare. Imagine the death and misery that will follow ObamaDeathcare.