I had a couple of recent posts on the organ donor issue: #1 here, and #2 here. I received an interesting comment on my blog, and an email, from Kidney Mama, who sent a link to this post on her blog.
Donation cards are not the answer for kidney transplants, and here’s why (Thanks to Dr. Sally Satel for sending me a copy of her excellent book “When Altruism Isn’t Enough,” from which this quote comes.):
Of the roughly 2 million Americans who die annually, relatively few possess organs healthy enough for transplanting. The number is estimated to range between 10,500 and 13,000, representing less than 1 percent of all deaths each year. … (Incidentally, this built-in constraint on the number of potentially transplantable kidneys underscores the reason a “presumed-consent” law … is unlikely to yield a huge windfall of transplantable kidneys.)
If you factor in the thousands of people who never get on the kidney waitlist (Thanks to Andrew Conte and Luis Fabregas at the Tribune-Review for continuing to shed light on this issue.), and the people who die each year waiting, it is clear that less than 15,000 organs per year will never cut it.
And the percentage of healthy kidneys will surely continue to drop as the population becomes more sick and more obese, and as more people rely on Big Pharma’s life-destroying pills to get them up and about each day. For an overview of the massive and failed kidney bureaucracy, see this article from 2009 on the Tribune-Review. The vast majority of people needing transplants are never put on the waiting list, but even so, that waiting list, managed by state and the medical establishment, is not the answer. Once again, the socialist-altruistic government-medical complex, with all of its oppressive social planning, manages to unnecessarily kill people while purporting to have found a better way.
That said, concerning the government’s goals for nationalized-socialist-redistributionist health care, Monty Python got it right on this issue, too.
