Holy shit this is one of the most horrifying and disgusting things I’ve read in a long while. American patients are losing out on access to lifesaving organs from American donors because
wealthy citizens of other nations pay exorbitant amounts in cash + make donations to connected charities to skip the line. This is something out of a dystopian movie like Parasite.
Ofc this is happening. For profit healthcare in America—particularly zero sum segments like organ transplants—caters to the rich and the elite. What’s being described here is a clear, “we don’t care about your ethnicity/country of origin; we take care of the 1%.”
Yes, this is insane, but it doesn’t have to be like this. As usual, we’re a complete anomaly here and this could easily be fixed, folks…
In many countries, this would be illegal. World leaders agreed in 2008 to fight so-called transplant tourism, and most nations do not provide organs to overseas patients. Yet the United States has long allowed it. The policy has drawn criticism in the past, such as when organs went to Saudi royals and a Japanese crime boss.
I wonder if one could get a lawyer to write up a health proxy that stipulates organ donation guidelines in the event of a sudden death or accident where donation were possible.
Like, if I get my skull caved in by falling construction debris, but I'm in a vegetative state, could my next of kin produce a document that says "yea you can give my liver away, but only to a child"?
I worked a CVICU in San Antonio. Had a heart transplant patient in the floor and he was one nasty piece of work. Extremely racist and misogynistic, very verbally abusive, and non compliant with care. Literally said he would never take a black n word heart. As if hearts grow on trees and people don’t have to die for a transplant to happen. He was only compliant for a WEEK and he got matched with a heart and got the procedure done. Naturally, he was non compliant with his care after, did terribly, and died 3 months later.
I just do not want my own heart and other organs going towards someone who is very publicly a KKK member and talks about assaulting his underage sister with no shame.
I got a kidney transplant a little over four years ago and I’ve made digital flyers for people who are still trying to find matching donors. If you’d be interested in one - I do them for free - send me a DM.
As someone waiting for a liver transplant please don’t remove yourself as that trend will hurt more patients in the end no matter how fucked up this is.
Its more complicated than that. You don’t have to be rich, you can have good insurance. Lots of public sector employees in the US get great healthcare. Lots of the poor get great healthcare, if they are on Medicaid and live near a major academic safety net center. The better way to phrase it is the US has some of the best healthcare in the world for those who can access it, and who can access it is a weird, eclectic mix that includes the wealthy as well as lots of people in the middle class and working class
There's a significant cost to that great health-care, though. The health insurance premiums are insane. Getting hundreds of dollars deducted from each paycheck is absurd, and I am one of the public employees you speak of. I know many others that have to pick one of the ACA plans, and due to the garbage regulation we currently have on that, those are even worse. So, as stated already, our health-care system sucks.
Have you played cyberpunk2077? Pretty cheesy at times but really awesome game that starts off with a healthcare crisis. Its always struck me to start there because the future seems so detached from human health crises but insurance/ for profit healthcare really has created this monster that overhangs over the rest of the futures problems.
you can pay yourself a billion dollar salary in a non-profit and still be a non-profit. all non-profit means is that the income stay within the entity amd does not go to outside investors. Many non-profits are a scam for the bemefit of the people running them
Not for profit hospitals are in many cases worse than for profit hospitals. They don’t generate profit for shareholders; instead that profit is distributed internally, both in terms of upgrading the hospital, but very significantly in terms of bonuses for executives. The more money they make, the bigger their bonuses. The incentives are still bad.
That was because he had access to a private jet, allowing him to be listed at multiple centers simultaneously as he had the ability to get almost anywhere within hours. Not to mention a patient who previously rejected medical advice and pursued “alternate medicine” would almost never be considered for a transplant as they generally can’t be trusted to follow medical advice after their transplant and take care of the organ if they don’t follow it before. Fucked around then cut the line using his money. A truly disgusting display of the medial establishment capitulating to money and fame.
I mean, I don't really want any grandma's organs. The sad thing about most transplants is that good ones come from young, healthy people who die in bad situations.
I'm pretty sure most elderly patients are disqualified from donating due to all the drugs they get prescribed later in life. Chemo definitely rules them out
Chemotherapy doesn't rule you out of donating your organs. Having active cancer (or a history of blood cancer) rules you out. If you are 5+ years NED, you are typically clear to donate an organ that wasn't the primary site of a cancer.
I take care of donor patients regularly. What is accepted changes day to day so it’s important to always call the coordinators and see what they are in need of.
Age is never really a factor but function of the organ is which tend to be correlated. You’d be amazed at what is accepted.
Older transplant recipients can actually opt into less-than-perfect organs, including organs from older donors or donors with certain diseases that usually preclude donation. There is even a mechanism for organ donations from HIV+ donors to go to HIV+ recipients.
Yep. A family member got an organ infected with hepatitis, caught hepatitis from it, and took the meds to cure it. Accepting a sick organ was worlds better than getting no transplant at all.
My friend was almost one of those. Subdural hematoma. Dude died twice on the operating table. Told he would never recover fully. Went on to live a decent life, though constantly plagued by depression and anger management issues. Passed away two years ago at age 40 due to an accidental fentynyl OD.
I’ve had several family members who were living on fixed income have emergency procedures. Their “bill” was substantially reduced to hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands. When I asked the financial aid folks they said donor money was used to cover much of what Medicaid didn’t.
I have a hard time knocking big donors getting special treatment when there’s money that ends up going to patients living near
/in poverty.
If you paid the rack rate and got a kidney, that doesn't make you a philanthropist.
What really happened is the hospital took a rich person's money, wrote off the cost of your family members' treatment (that they would have had to do anyway due to emergency care ethics laws), and told you a sweet story about it.
Your point?? I had 30k medical debt from a car accident where they hounded me for a couple years and then it dropped off the face of the earth. Medical debt is bullshit just like our Healthcare system.
The bizarre thing about the American organ biz is that donors, or the families of donors, aren't permitted to sell the organs. They get nothing. But everyone else involved in the transaction -- the brokers, the surgeons, the hospitals -- makes piles of money.
We certainly shouldn't be able to sell family members' organs while they're alive. But once relatives are dead, the organs should be considered a valuable asset of their estate, available for sale to benefit the heirs.
Edit: This is relevant, not only to the transplant market, but the cadaver market. Body brokers can turn one body into tens of thousands of dollars worth of anatomical merchandise, used for stuff like training doctors. Families of the deceased see none of that money.
This sort of posthumous selling happened in Victorian England when there was a market for bodies to dissect. It led to an entirely new type of murder being given an official name.
Considering people kill family members for insurance policies.
Knowing that family member that you are unhappy with would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if they just died already, solving all of your problems, is not a good thing.
I mean it’s a sad reality and it shouldn’t ruin it for the people who would never, but honestly I don’t doubt that it would lead to an increase in such cases, as people already do it for much less financial gain.
Because of the prohibition on organ sales, a person who dies poor is barred from leaving his loved ones the one thing of value that he has left in the world. Meanwhile, the medical establishment makes bank.
Yeah the medical establishment should not be making bank that’s horrific.
However that exact sentiment would mean a lot of people would be worth more to their family dead than alive, which would lead to an increase in suicide and homicide.
Not really, life insurance is just the people who can afford life insurance and the insurance company has entire investigative units dedicated to catching fraud.
This would be every death, who’s going to investigate every single death (apart from doe cases I guess) to make sure they didn’t die for the profit from their organs?
I mean already people getting killed for their insurance is a trope and a reality, but it’s mostly limited to middle class/wealthy people.
This would be every death, who’s going to investigate every single death (apart from doe cases I guess) to make sure they didn’t die for the profit from their organs?
No, it wouldn't be every death, it would be a tiny percentage of them. Most deaths are old people whose organs aren't useful for transplant. And among deaths of younger people with useful organs, most of those organs don't get used. About 3 million Americans die per year, while there are only about 50,000 transplants per year.
It takes a very specific set of circumstances for organs to be suitable for transplant after a death. Greedy relatives looking for an easy payout by murdering their loved one would have a hard time replicating those circumstances.
Have you not heard of insurance? You can just get life insurance on someone and do the same thing for your dumb get rich scheme except just like insurance you know they'd be all over your ass to make sure it was kosher
The problem is that just creates perverse incentives to kill people for their organs. The better solution is to disallow profiting off organs by anyone at any stage in the process.
I think what people miss, is just this. It’s not that I don’t want to save someone’s life and it’s not that I won’t. But it disgusts me that the industry makes so much from a body and we collectively can’t get our shit together to allocate something to family left behind. Forgive some of their student loans, give them a scholarship - anything but absorbing every dollar they can for profit. There are people that will scream, that you should do it for altruistic purposes - and yes in a perfect world you should but we don’t live in that world, not in the US. Medical bills should be written off for donors, funeral costs should be free.
When our son was in a coma with brain activity, they were pestering us. My husband threw the woman out of the room and she had the balls, so to speak, to ambush me in the cafeteria. When he was able to talk to told us about the conversations he overhead, verbatim. He laid there for weeks unable to speak thinking we we’d go to rest and they would kill him. I’m sorry for those that are need and I pity those that think they are better. But this industry needs to be reformed and donors should be compensated. Maybe if the profits for them were less, I don’t know - but this needs to change.
How dreadful! What an awful thing to have to contemplate when you can’t talk and in a coma, but can still hear and think. You sound like great parents.
It chills me the conversations he was able to relay. There was haggling with FNP and her boyfriend assistant who was also a physical therapist about placing the NG tube. She was a contractor who hadn’t been paid on time for the last three. Looking at you St. David’s.
Those people in ICU, they can hear you talk about sending them to the vegetable farm for harvest. You may have saved his life and I’m forever grateful but you have some seriously fecked up staff and policies.
It’s incredible how toxic individual hospital cultures are. And that level of toxicity can also vary from department to department or floor to floor within the same hospital. A major part of this is the financial extraction mode for profit of our healthcare system. Which directly affects patient care, so a patient ends up with a contract worker performing life and death procedures on them who isn’t paid enough or on time, who doesn’t thoroughly know their job, is operating on a floor where everyone else’s is new and a contract worker, and who’s been badly trained.
I’m so sorry your son and you went through this and continue to have it as part of your reality.
During my last stay at the hospital, I had to verbally kick a senior doctor out of my room because he said some things that clearly demonstrated that while he apparently is functioning as a doctor, mentally he is unhinged. Apparently, in that particular hospital, there’s no way to remove a senior level Doctor Who is mentally unhinged. He said some totally inappropriate things to me when the two of us were alone in my room. Luckily, the next day I got a dr to replace him who was good and he did the procedure. The whole thing was so stressful my hair started to fall out literally. Not quite sure what my outcome would’ve been if I had been incapable of advocating for myself. Thankfully, your son has you and your husband.
Knew a guy that worked maintenance (janitor) at Walmart. He happened to have an uncommon blood type and healthy organs. A casino owner in need of a kidney treated him to a deluxe executive suite vacation with a 40k casino credit.
Guy returned to work a couple weeks later with a slight limp and some pain meds.
This is to say, there are ways around the "no compensation".
Don’t be stupid. You want highly trained individuals to deal with organ transplants. People who actually perform the skill necessary for the transplants need to be compensated well.
It’s also true that family getting nothing and instead the money going to brokers, shareholders, and administrative folks of the hospital is equally stupid.
Don't be a jerk. I never suggested the doctors shouldn't be paid fairly for their work. I just said donors should be paid as well. The heart transplant described in the article cost $1.9 million. Surely some portion of that should have gone to the donor's family.
I am an organ donor, and yes, I would like to stipulate that either (a) the recipient is a US resident (as am I) or (b) any organs 'donated' will be considered a sale to the hospital.
My son is a transplant recipient, waited 88 days for his miracle heart, and I HAD NO IDEA this was a thing. They make it seem like it is 100% first come first serve, and medical need/match. I cannot stress enough how mind blowing this is to me right now.
*Correction: Does everything in this country suck for poor people? If you’re wealthy, I can’t think of another country where your fortune can buy you as much as in the US.
If you can’t monetize it it’s communism.
And as we all know communism leads to authoritarian strong man rulers, people living the life of luxury off of your tax dollars and rampant corruption in the government.
Not to mention people completely unqualified being put in positions of power and controlling policy purely based on their level of loyalty to the party.
And you wouldn’t want that.
In response to requests for comment, several hospitals emphasized that giving transplants to international patients is legal, and said those patients do not get preferential treatment. Some described their work as humanitarian.
Oh well there you go, it's humanitarian. Nothing to see here folks. Porcine xenotransplantation can't come soon enough, I sure hope none of the groups researching that are struggling for funding while we piss away money harassing immigrants and Venezuela.
Also
She had faced long odds of getting a new heart in Japan, where only about 10 percent of residents are registered donors and the wait for a transplant can stretch for years.
I did not know that Japan's donor rate was so low, dang, sounds like something they should work on.
This activity is the reason my father died last night.
I can barely get through writing this post, but I feel I need to let the world know that with another real immediate statistic that we're killing people to chase money.
Please don’t, this isn’t common, I know, I’m a multi transplant patient, and help patients with care after transplant. These incidents are the outlier, and it isn’t fair to the many more hospitals, doctors, and staff that save lives every day. It’s definitely not right, and should be outlawed.
My biggest fear is being sold to those in-person dissection shows. As a victim of S/A it terrifies me, the thought of strange men seeing my body like that.
I’d love if my donated organ(s) went to a poor local in need, but I’m not going to consign a wealthy person and a poor person to death simply because the wealthy person is more likely to get the organ.
Not actactlly a "transplant Tourist", but Bernie Kosar (Former Cleveland Browns Quarterback) just received a gifted Liver transplant from a family who had a sudden death of their 21 year old son. They are browns fans and elected that their son's Liver go to Bernie. Bernie had the liver transplant surgery and and Bernie gifted the family $25,000 dollars. This was all documented on social media and ethically felt a little wrong to me.
My wife previously worked with Dr. Jeevanandam's team (a surgeon mentioned here). He is a racist and he judges people by their class.
Terrific surgeon, but he definitely has justified this immoral behavior in his own mind.
Meanwhile I have a friend slowly dying after his kidneys were removed three years ago. Has really good insurance, but is trying to do the right thing and wait his turn in line. Disheartening to see Dr. taking bribes now, but what do you expect when our government sets the standards as such.
This is America C.R.E.A.M. If you don’t know cash rules everything around me look at our country it is a mess ! If you are super rich it is paradise you can buy everything including presidential pardons
One of the most insane things about our for profit health system I heard during the pandemic. A doctor friend told me that his hospital, despite being full of Covid patients, was having severe budget shortfalls. That’s because they couldn’t serve people who wanted elective procedures, which pay the bills during normal times, because of all the patients they had to keep from dying. It’s insane that a hospital might go bankrupt because it’s at capacity due to a health emergency.
Yeah, it’s an awful feature of how our system works. Most of the services we provide in a hospital setting run at a loss, with the difference made up for by a small number of highly lucrative services (oncology, cardiology, and elective surgery, for the most part). So even though the ‘demand’ for hospital care soared during the pandemic, all that meant was that hospitals got pushed to the financial edge
My fellow Americans, your organs are being effectively sold to foreign millionaires while our own brothers and sisters languish in the hope their day on the transplant list will come.
Hot take: The donor’s family should have power of refusal based on how long the patient has been on the waiting list (as long as it isn’t life-or-death).
We have a desperate need for living organ donors. Getting more people to donate after death won't cut it, the kind of dead person that can donate is someone in a permanent coma, an uncommon occurrence.
1% of the federal budget is spent on kidney dialysis. 500k people are on it right now, and 50k die every year because they lack the ability to clean their blood.
We pay 50-100k per individual per year to slowly die on dialysis, yet we refuse to pay even 10k to anyone who wants to donate an organ and solve their problem. We are losing money letting people die. Giving donors money would save us a ton of money and lives.
You voted for an economy like this, what do you expect to happen? As the dollar ceases to be the world’s currency and we’re a nation with so much debt expect more and more medical tourism like this. While US citizens pay higher and higher premiums for insurance that does less and less and basically finances it all. Keep voting for Republicans America. It’s really working out well. 🤣🤣👍👍👍
That organ donation isn't opt-out is the real tragedy.
I'd go further: if you opt out, you shouldn't be eligible to get an organ. But considering most people (ridiculously) think opt-out is already going too far, let's not even mention this part.
My college girlfriend had her grandma fly out from her home in Middle East in
For an emergency. I was like wtf, she has kidney failure. Two weeks later I learned she had a transplant. This family had tons of money in the states and Middle East. I still do not understand how this all happened so fast to someone who has been to USA only few times. But it is making sense now.
If we had a functioning government the answer would just be they have to pass this money along to offset what they take from the government. They’ll stop it immediately.
I mean if you allow the practice what did you expect?
Two thoughts kept surfacing for me as I read:
Holy shit this is one of the most horrifying and disgusting things I’ve read in a long while. American patients are losing out on access to lifesaving organs from American donors because wealthy citizens of other nations pay exorbitant amounts in cash + make donations to connected charities to skip the line. This is something out of a dystopian movie like Parasite.
Ofc this is happening. For profit healthcare in America—particularly zero sum segments like organ transplants—caters to the rich and the elite. What’s being described here is a clear, “we don’t care about your ethnicity/country of origin; we take care of the 1%.”
Yes, this is insane, but it doesn’t have to be like this. As usual, we’re a complete anomaly here and this could easily be fixed, folks…
Almost makes me not want to be an organ donor. I don't want my parts going to some rich fuck who skipped the line and let "the poors" die.
I wonder if one could get a lawyer to write up a health proxy that stipulates organ donation guidelines in the event of a sudden death or accident where donation were possible.
Like, if I get my skull caved in by falling construction debris, but I'm in a vegetative state, could my next of kin produce a document that says "yea you can give my liver away, but only to a child"?
Or give it away to only someone with less than 100k assets?
Imma just be as unhealthy as I can so my organs are totally undesirable to the wealthy. Just doing my part to fight the power
Don’t worry, they’ll harvest the organs soon enough and the rich won’t need to worry about people donating.
Wonder if that’s where the missing people from Alligator Alcatraz or other ICE kidnappings went
I worked a CVICU in San Antonio. Had a heart transplant patient in the floor and he was one nasty piece of work. Extremely racist and misogynistic, very verbally abusive, and non compliant with care. Literally said he would never take a black n word heart. As if hearts grow on trees and people don’t have to die for a transplant to happen. He was only compliant for a WEEK and he got matched with a heart and got the procedure done. Naturally, he was non compliant with his care after, did terribly, and died 3 months later.
I just do not want my own heart and other organs going towards someone who is very publicly a KKK member and talks about assaulting his underage sister with no shame.
Except the rich will still get theirs, this will only screw over the regular people…like me. =\
I got a kidney transplant a little over four years ago and I’ve made digital flyers for people who are still trying to find matching donors. If you’d be interested in one - I do them for free - send me a DM.
I may take you up on that in the next year or so. Thank you!
As someone waiting for a liver transplant please don’t remove yourself as that trend will hurt more patients in the end no matter how fucked up this is.
Thank you for being a donor
Dont worry, prisoners will be coerced into becoming donors creating a sustainable supply of organs for the 1%
Option 1. You give your organs, some rich asshole gets it, but there's one more organ left behind and someone else can get that
Option 2. The previously left behind organ is all that's available, rich asshole gets it, other guy gets nothing and dies
Yea I would never donate organs i explicitly detailed my brain not to be transplanted into rich guys body
Wonderful to know this when one of my good friends has needed a kidney for over a year now. This country's Healthcare system is ass.
What is it people say? America has some of the best healthcare in the world, if you're rich.
Its more complicated than that. You don’t have to be rich, you can have good insurance. Lots of public sector employees in the US get great healthcare. Lots of the poor get great healthcare, if they are on Medicaid and live near a major academic safety net center. The better way to phrase it is the US has some of the best healthcare in the world for those who can access it, and who can access it is a weird, eclectic mix that includes the wealthy as well as lots of people in the middle class and working class
There's a significant cost to that great health-care, though. The health insurance premiums are insane. Getting hundreds of dollars deducted from each paycheck is absurd, and I am one of the public employees you speak of. I know many others that have to pick one of the ACA plans, and due to the garbage regulation we currently have on that, those are even worse. So, as stated already, our health-care system sucks.
Have you played cyberpunk2077? Pretty cheesy at times but really awesome game that starts off with a healthcare crisis. Its always struck me to start there because the future seems so detached from human health crises but insurance/ for profit healthcare really has created this monster that overhangs over the rest of the futures problems.
It’s all about the money.
Always is 😔
Wow, a for-profit health industry goes after the bigger profit...
Shocked
Interestingly enough, the hospitals noted in the article are “not for profit” hospitals.
you can pay yourself a billion dollar salary in a non-profit and still be a non-profit. all non-profit means is that the income stay within the entity amd does not go to outside investors. Many non-profits are a scam for the bemefit of the people running them
This isn't true, non-profits are different than not-for-profits.
Uh huh.
Not for profit hospitals are in many cases worse than for profit hospitals. They don’t generate profit for shareholders; instead that profit is distributed internally, both in terms of upgrading the hospital, but very significantly in terms of bonuses for executives. The more money they make, the bigger their bonuses. The incentives are still bad.
it's almost like the difference between companies that have gone public and those which have not.
Steve Jobs sure didn't have a hard time finding a liver when he needed it after rejecting medical treatment for years before then.
That was because he had access to a private jet, allowing him to be listed at multiple centers simultaneously as he had the ability to get almost anywhere within hours. Not to mention a patient who previously rejected medical advice and pursued “alternate medicine” would almost never be considered for a transplant as they generally can’t be trusted to follow medical advice after their transplant and take care of the organ if they don’t follow it before. Fucked around then cut the line using his money. A truly disgusting display of the medial establishment capitulating to money and fame.
Don’t forget when the FBI helped a Yakuza member get a liver transplant, skipping the line at UCLA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadamasa_Goto
They did it because he was an informant
Yeah, a shitty informant that didn’t really tell us much and said he was gonna stop doing crime and then continued after getting his liver
I found out about that from a tv show
Tokyo vice?
Weirdly they closed this loophole.
But theres an international loophole too ??
You grandma died and wants to donate her organs and they sell it to the highest bidder. Cool country.
I mean, I don't really want any grandma's organs. The sad thing about most transplants is that good ones come from young, healthy people who die in bad situations.
Lapse of thought, I actually did know this but if you are 60 and you need a kidney I'm sure you'd take a 70 year old one.
I'm pretty sure most elderly patients are disqualified from donating due to all the drugs they get prescribed later in life. Chemo definitely rules them out
Chemotherapy doesn't rule you out of donating your organs. Having active cancer (or a history of blood cancer) rules you out. If you are 5+ years NED, you are typically clear to donate an organ that wasn't the primary site of a cancer.
I take care of donor patients regularly. What is accepted changes day to day so it’s important to always call the coordinators and see what they are in need of.
Age is never really a factor but function of the organ is which tend to be correlated. You’d be amazed at what is accepted.
Older transplant recipients can actually opt into less-than-perfect organs, including organs from older donors or donors with certain diseases that usually preclude donation. There is even a mechanism for organ donations from HIV+ donors to go to HIV+ recipients.
Yep. A family member got an organ infected with hepatitis, caught hepatitis from it, and took the meds to cure it. Accepting a sick organ was worlds better than getting no transplant at all.
Trafficking becomes more profitable nowadays I guess.
I wonder where all those kids ICE took went?
Are you implying ICE have been harvesting children’s organs?
It wouldn't be the first authoritarian regime in modern times to do so.
See the Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners of China having their organs forcibly harvested.
Lot of missing Ukrainian children, and children of immigrants in the United States...
Not even just Ukrainian children, we have confirmed cases of Ukrainian POWs being returned by Russia with organs removed.
OMG! Do you have any articles about this?
AP Article
I heard similarly for Palestinians
Your high school child who got hit a little too hard at the football game can keep contributing to shareholder value with this one cool trick! ♥️
My friend was almost one of those. Subdural hematoma. Dude died twice on the operating table. Told he would never recover fully. Went on to live a decent life, though constantly plagued by depression and anger management issues. Passed away two years ago at age 40 due to an accidental fentynyl OD.
Feel like this sketch fit right there. >.>
The entire medical system including insurance is screwed up and like everything else money is the reason.
Incoming users who suspiciously participate in medical professional subs defending the profession, tho
Nurse here reminding everyone that we're human too. But medical professionals aren't making these decisions. People with business degrees are.
I’ve had several family members who were living on fixed income have emergency procedures. Their “bill” was substantially reduced to hundreds of dollars instead of tens of thousands. When I asked the financial aid folks they said donor money was used to cover much of what Medicaid didn’t.
I have a hard time knocking big donors getting special treatment when there’s money that ends up going to patients living near /in poverty.
If you paid the rack rate and got a kidney, that doesn't make you a philanthropist.
What really happened is the hospital took a rich person's money, wrote off the cost of your family members' treatment (that they would have had to do anyway due to emergency care ethics laws), and told you a sweet story about it.
Not before shocking them with the predatory bill just to say "aren't we being so nice to you??"
Your point?? I had 30k medical debt from a car accident where they hounded me for a couple years and then it dropped off the face of the earth. Medical debt is bullshit just like our Healthcare system.
That is still a trolley problem, friend
The bizarre thing about the American organ biz is that donors, or the families of donors, aren't permitted to sell the organs. They get nothing. But everyone else involved in the transaction -- the brokers, the surgeons, the hospitals -- makes piles of money.
I mean it’s good you can’t sell your family members organs, but definitely bad that other people can.
We certainly shouldn't be able to sell family members' organs while they're alive. But once relatives are dead, the organs should be considered a valuable asset of their estate, available for sale to benefit the heirs.
Edit: This is relevant, not only to the transplant market, but the cadaver market. Body brokers can turn one body into tens of thousands of dollars worth of anatomical merchandise, used for stuff like training doctors. Families of the deceased see none of that money.
This sort of posthumous selling happened in Victorian England when there was a market for bodies to dissect. It led to an entirely new type of murder being given an official name.
If there’s a way to make money, people are gonna try to get that money. Doesn’t matter what it is or how deplorable.
Considering people kill family members for insurance policies.
Knowing that family member that you are unhappy with would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if they just died already, solving all of your problems, is not a good thing.
I mean it’s a sad reality and it shouldn’t ruin it for the people who would never, but honestly I don’t doubt that it would lead to an increase in such cases, as people already do it for much less financial gain.
Because of the prohibition on organ sales, a person who dies poor is barred from leaving his loved ones the one thing of value that he has left in the world. Meanwhile, the medical establishment makes bank.
Yeah the medical establishment should not be making bank that’s horrific.
However that exact sentiment would mean a lot of people would be worth more to their family dead than alive, which would lead to an increase in suicide and homicide.
By your own reasoning, life insurance should not be legal.
Not really, life insurance is just the people who can afford life insurance and the insurance company has entire investigative units dedicated to catching fraud.
This would be every death, who’s going to investigate every single death (apart from doe cases I guess) to make sure they didn’t die for the profit from their organs?
I mean already people getting killed for their insurance is a trope and a reality, but it’s mostly limited to middle class/wealthy people.
No, it wouldn't be every death, it would be a tiny percentage of them. Most deaths are old people whose organs aren't useful for transplant. And among deaths of younger people with useful organs, most of those organs don't get used. About 3 million Americans die per year, while there are only about 50,000 transplants per year.
It takes a very specific set of circumstances for organs to be suitable for transplant after a death. Greedy relatives looking for an easy payout by murdering their loved one would have a hard time replicating those circumstances.
Have you not heard of insurance? You can just get life insurance on someone and do the same thing for your dumb get rich scheme except just like insurance you know they'd be all over your ass to make sure it was kosher
The problem is that just creates perverse incentives to kill people for their organs. The better solution is to disallow profiting off organs by anyone at any stage in the process.
I think what people miss, is just this. It’s not that I don’t want to save someone’s life and it’s not that I won’t. But it disgusts me that the industry makes so much from a body and we collectively can’t get our shit together to allocate something to family left behind. Forgive some of their student loans, give them a scholarship - anything but absorbing every dollar they can for profit. There are people that will scream, that you should do it for altruistic purposes - and yes in a perfect world you should but we don’t live in that world, not in the US. Medical bills should be written off for donors, funeral costs should be free.
When our son was in a coma with brain activity, they were pestering us. My husband threw the woman out of the room and she had the balls, so to speak, to ambush me in the cafeteria. When he was able to talk to told us about the conversations he overhead, verbatim. He laid there for weeks unable to speak thinking we we’d go to rest and they would kill him. I’m sorry for those that are need and I pity those that think they are better. But this industry needs to be reformed and donors should be compensated. Maybe if the profits for them were less, I don’t know - but this needs to change.
Edit, removed a jumbled sentence
How dreadful! What an awful thing to have to contemplate when you can’t talk and in a coma, but can still hear and think. You sound like great parents.
It chills me the conversations he was able to relay. There was haggling with FNP and her boyfriend assistant who was also a physical therapist about placing the NG tube. She was a contractor who hadn’t been paid on time for the last three. Looking at you St. David’s.
Those people in ICU, they can hear you talk about sending them to the vegetable farm for harvest. You may have saved his life and I’m forever grateful but you have some seriously fecked up staff and policies.
It’s incredible how toxic individual hospital cultures are. And that level of toxicity can also vary from department to department or floor to floor within the same hospital. A major part of this is the financial extraction mode for profit of our healthcare system. Which directly affects patient care, so a patient ends up with a contract worker performing life and death procedures on them who isn’t paid enough or on time, who doesn’t thoroughly know their job, is operating on a floor where everyone else’s is new and a contract worker, and who’s been badly trained.
I’m so sorry your son and you went through this and continue to have it as part of your reality.
During my last stay at the hospital, I had to verbally kick a senior doctor out of my room because he said some things that clearly demonstrated that while he apparently is functioning as a doctor, mentally he is unhinged. Apparently, in that particular hospital, there’s no way to remove a senior level Doctor Who is mentally unhinged. He said some totally inappropriate things to me when the two of us were alone in my room. Luckily, the next day I got a dr to replace him who was good and he did the procedure. The whole thing was so stressful my hair started to fall out literally. Not quite sure what my outcome would’ve been if I had been incapable of advocating for myself. Thankfully, your son has you and your husband.
omg, I hope you are ok now. It’s one thing everyone needs to be, their own patient advocate or having someone to speak for you. Happy Holidays to you.
Thank you! Hair is growing back thank goodness.
Happy holidays to you as well
Knew a guy that worked maintenance (janitor) at Walmart. He happened to have an uncommon blood type and healthy organs. A casino owner in need of a kidney treated him to a deluxe executive suite vacation with a 40k casino credit.
Guy returned to work a couple weeks later with a slight limp and some pain meds.
This is to say, there are ways around the "no compensation".
Bernie Kosar wrote his Donor family an $25,000 Check.
The surgeon showed up to their job, why shouldn’t they be paid for it?
And the donor showed up with a much-needed organ. Why shouldn't he be paid as well?
Don’t be stupid. You want highly trained individuals to deal with organ transplants. People who actually perform the skill necessary for the transplants need to be compensated well.
It’s also true that family getting nothing and instead the money going to brokers, shareholders, and administrative folks of the hospital is equally stupid.
Don't be a jerk. I never suggested the doctors shouldn't be paid fairly for their work. I just said donors should be paid as well. The heart transplant described in the article cost $1.9 million. Surely some portion of that should have gone to the donor's family.
They simply hold them to the same standard as college athletes
More like donor article
I'll reject it.
C’mon B positive…
TIL there should be stipulations attached to organ donation.
I am an organ donor, and yes, I would like to stipulate that either (a) the recipient is a US resident (as am I) or (b) any organs 'donated' will be considered a sale to the hospital.
Rich people get special treatment in the US? Who would've thought
My son is a transplant recipient, waited 88 days for his miracle heart, and I HAD NO IDEA this was a thing. They make it seem like it is 100% first come first serve, and medical need/match. I cannot stress enough how mind blowing this is to me right now.
These U.S. institutions should lose their tax exempt status over this.
They should be charged with murder.
Does everything in this country suck?
Our shrinking natural beauty is still nice.
*Correction: Does everything in this country suck for poor people? If you’re wealthy, I can’t think of another country where your fortune can buy you as much as in the US.
If you can’t monetize it it’s communism.
And as we all know communism leads to authoritarian strong man rulers, people living the life of luxury off of your tax dollars and rampant corruption in the government.
Not to mention people completely unqualified being put in positions of power and controlling policy purely based on their level of loyalty to the party.
And you wouldn’t want that.
Some of the food is pretty decent. And it's mostly nontoxic (for now).
Oh well there you go, it's humanitarian. Nothing to see here folks. Porcine xenotransplantation can't come soon enough, I sure hope none of the groups researching that are struggling for funding while we piss away money harassing immigrants and Venezuela.
Also
I did not know that Japan's donor rate was so low, dang, sounds like something they should work on.
The leader of the Yakuza, Tadamasa Goto, get a transplant at UCLA in 2006.
This is not a new phenomenon.
They reference that in the article
The same guy on whom Tokyo vice is based and due to whom that very same journalist needed FBI protection.
Iirc he was the leader if the yamaguchi gumi at the time at war with other factions.
Yeah he really did not seem to be a good guy in that show.
Makes sense, their number one surgeon with a steady hand fled to America.
Those institutions that allow this should lose their Medicare funding and eligibility.
This activity is the reason my father died last night.
I can barely get through writing this post, but I feel I need to let the world know that with another real immediate statistic that we're killing people to chase money.
So sorry for your loss. Thanks for taking the time to share.
Thank you. it's the first time I've wrote it down. Felt like I had to do it in this thread.
My candles are lit tonight, I will honor your father.
Appreciated. The system that claims to honor veterans won't, so thank you.
Fucking disgusting. Makes me want to cancel my tissue and organ donor status.
Ya I'll probably remove it next time I get my ID updated.
Please don’t, this isn’t common, I know, I’m a multi transplant patient, and help patients with care after transplant. These incidents are the outlier, and it isn’t fair to the many more hospitals, doctors, and staff that save lives every day. It’s definitely not right, and should be outlawed.
Blame the capitalists.
Pick up a pitchfork then. It's about time the entire country revolts..
Suddenly not so keen on being an organ donor…
My biggest fear is being sold to those in-person dissection shows. As a victim of S/A it terrifies me, the thought of strange men seeing my body like that.
I’d love if my donated organ(s) went to a poor local in need, but I’m not going to consign a wealthy person and a poor person to death simply because the wealthy person is more likely to get the organ.
Not actactlly a "transplant Tourist", but Bernie Kosar (Former Cleveland Browns Quarterback) just received a gifted Liver transplant from a family who had a sudden death of their 21 year old son. They are browns fans and elected that their son's Liver go to Bernie. Bernie had the liver transplant surgery and and Bernie gifted the family $25,000 dollars. This was all documented on social media and ethically felt a little wrong to me.
Pretty sure a YouTuber I watch had a fan nice enough to give his dad a kidney or something.
My wife previously worked with Dr. Jeevanandam's team (a surgeon mentioned here). He is a racist and he judges people by their class. Terrific surgeon, but he definitely has justified this immoral behavior in his own mind.
Welcome to America, where the fast pass and subscriptions are the way of life
So nice we've voted oursepv3s I to a caste system
Meanwhile I have a friend slowly dying after his kidneys were removed three years ago. Has really good insurance, but is trying to do the right thing and wait his turn in line. Disheartening to see Dr. taking bribes now, but what do you expect when our government sets the standards as such.
Literally selling our children’s organs to rich foreigners.
This is revolting to learn.
Rich people get first dibs? As long as history has been written has this ever been different?
This reminds me of the whole scandal about multiple Yakuza bosses going to UCLA in the early 2000s to skip the lines and get liver transplants.
No one should be surprised this happens. Being angry is perfectly justified though.
Holy shit this should be a big story
This is America C.R.E.A.M. If you don’t know cash rules everything around me look at our country it is a mess ! If you are super rich it is paradise you can buy everything including presidential pardons
One of the most insane things about our for profit health system I heard during the pandemic. A doctor friend told me that his hospital, despite being full of Covid patients, was having severe budget shortfalls. That’s because they couldn’t serve people who wanted elective procedures, which pay the bills during normal times, because of all the patients they had to keep from dying. It’s insane that a hospital might go bankrupt because it’s at capacity due to a health emergency.
Yeah, it’s an awful feature of how our system works. Most of the services we provide in a hospital setting run at a loss, with the difference made up for by a small number of highly lucrative services (oncology, cardiology, and elective surgery, for the most part). So even though the ‘demand’ for hospital care soared during the pandemic, all that meant was that hospitals got pushed to the financial edge
This is one of the many reasons I cannot be an organ donor. Unless I get a say, it might go to some rich scum that should twist in the wind instead.
It certainly gave me hesitation for the first time in my life.
Butchers and ghouls. It's Halloween every day.
I thought this had to be some weird article from a weird website. Nytimes. Yeah we are fucked even our organ donations are corrupted completely.
this is reason #57356 why im an RN who is no longer an organ donor
I’m sure this is where a lot of detainees get “disappeared” to… lots of rich fuckwits needing transplants.
They prob figured since it’s such a success in China, might as well copy them.
Will this make people not want to be an organ donors, to make hospitals sweat….?
And people wonder why some Americans are less supportive of a universal opt-out policy for organ donation in the country with the way it is right now.
My husband changed his donor status due to his insider knowledge on this. I will also change my status to not donate.
My fellow Americans, your organs are being effectively sold to foreign millionaires while our own brothers and sisters languish in the hope their day on the transplant list will come.
This country is beyond boned at every level.
Hot take: The donor’s family should have power of refusal based on how long the patient has been on the waiting list (as long as it isn’t life-or-death).
We have a desperate need for living organ donors. Getting more people to donate after death won't cut it, the kind of dead person that can donate is someone in a permanent coma, an uncommon occurrence.
1% of the federal budget is spent on kidney dialysis. 500k people are on it right now, and 50k die every year because they lack the ability to clean their blood.
We pay 50-100k per individual per year to slowly die on dialysis, yet we refuse to pay even 10k to anyone who wants to donate an organ and solve their problem. We are losing money letting people die. Giving donors money would save us a ton of money and lives.
This has been happening for decades. That's why never be an organ donor.
I get the propaganda worked.
Anyone ready to embrace socialism yet?
Or is getting fucked here by the capitalism daddy still required.
We are so GD slow to evolve.
You voted for an economy like this, what do you expect to happen? As the dollar ceases to be the world’s currency and we’re a nation with so much debt expect more and more medical tourism like this. While US citizens pay higher and higher premiums for insurance that does less and less and basically finances it all. Keep voting for Republicans America. It’s really working out well. 🤣🤣👍👍👍
This is why I’m not an organ donor. If they’re doing this for the name of profit. They’re also ignoring you for the sake of profit.
Soon enough there won't be organ donors anymore and family will be auctioning a patient's organs.
That organ donation isn't opt-out is the real tragedy.
I'd go further: if you opt out, you shouldn't be eligible to get an organ. But considering most people (ridiculously) think opt-out is already going too far, let's not even mention this part.
Maybe organs can be procured from Saudi Arabia?
/s
Oh, no but you see, for-profit, private healthcare is the best because, you know, you can now have the best care!
My college girlfriend had her grandma fly out from her home in Middle East in For an emergency. I was like wtf, she has kidney failure. Two weeks later I learned she had a transplant. This family had tons of money in the states and Middle East. I still do not understand how this all happened so fast to someone who has been to USA only few times. But it is making sense now.
If we had a functioning government the answer would just be they have to pass this money along to offset what they take from the government. They’ll stop it immediately.
So this is why middle-managers will pressure doctors into continuing an organ harvest if they find out you're actually not dead.
Gotta harvest the poors to give the rich geriatrics their fifth heart!