Free Market Health

Please, please, can't we have sensible policy when it comes to compensating donors? People are dying.

Organ Donation

Iran leads the way in market principles. More here.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs' move to Tennessee, where waits are short, from California, where waits are long, to get a liver transplant served as a boldface reminder last year of the enduring problem. "There's no question there are patients chasing organs rather than the organs coming to the patients," Dr. James Pomposelli, a transplant surgeon told the Wall Street Journal at the time.


Now, would you believe that Iran may have cracked the problem by paying living donors a modest amount, practically eliminating kidney shortages. The Iranian government pays living donors the equivalent of about $1,200 and throws in a year of some health coverage. Recipients give the donors a few thousand dollars more through a sanctioned, nonprofit intermediary.

Transplants

UW Hospital has improved kidney transplant outcomes enough to get referrals from OptumHealth again. Story here.

Kidney Donation

Looks like the fear that donating a kidney reduces life expectancy is unfounded. Maybe this will clear the way for selling kidneys and saving lives?

People who donate a kidney live just as long and are just as healthy as those with two kidneys, according to a new study by University of Minnesota researchers that is the largest ever done on the long-term health consequences of donation.

The study provides a reassurance that experts hope will encourage more organ donations at a time when the need for such life-saving transplants is on the rise. Today there are 78,000 people on the kidney transplant list, and most will not survive the five- to seven-year wait for a kidney from a deceased donor.

Researchers tracked down nearly all of the 3,700 people who had donated kidneys at the university’s transplant center between 1963 and 2007.

The findings will be published today in the New England Journal of Medicine with an editorial that described the results as surprising and quite reassuring.