I don’t want any hospital having a cash incentive toward my early demise. This incident and those like it are making me rethink my organ donor directive. It’s better to be worth more alive than dead.
The hospital doesn’t have a financial incentive for donation. They have nothing to do with the decision.
State law requires all hospitals (50 state laws) to report certain criteria to the area’s OPO (organ procurement organization).
The OPO makes the decision to donate or not after the patients doctors declare them dead.
There are triple blind protections here. The OPO is removed from the certification of death. The local doctors and hospitals are removed from the donation decision. And the receiving docs/patients don’t hear anything about a potential donor until after the decision is made and the organs are matched by the OPO, so a potential receiving doc/patient/hospital cannot influence the outcome because they don’t become part of the process until after the decision is made.
In most cases, organs are flown out of the hospital where the person died to the hospital where the next best match lives, it’s not a one-stop business.
Take this article: if the hospital had kept the dead lady on life support for the next several days, they stood to gain far more financially from several days of extremely high level care than they would by having an OPO come and prematurely end the care they are providing to someone who is dead. Following the patient’s wishes here (instead of the family) likely cost the hospital tens of thousands of dollars in extra care. The hospital, just like the family, has no say in the process.
There are safeguards that prevent the conspiracy stories presented on this website. In almost every article negative to donation that is posted here, it’s readily obvious that someone with a bias purposely misrepresents a key fact. Normally, they are grieving and looking to place blame.
That’s understandable.
It’s not a conspiracy.
Donations save lives. That’s the point.
I know what you mean. I want to be dead before I am harvested.