Word: livers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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FIVE YEARS ago, if your heart had a congenital defect, you didn't have too many options. Now, the power of medical technology can turn a death bed into a hospital bed, at least temporarily. Only recent surgical and pharmaceutical advances make heart and liver transplants possible. Why is there an issue? First of all, there simply aren't enough organs to go around; how do we decide who benefits from the limited supply? Second, the transplant costs on the order of 10 times what a normal operation costs, around $300,000 for a single liver transplant. Since this money...
...Thomas Starzl, a noted transplant surgeon at the University Health Center in Pittsburgh, argues that "the cost of transplants is no higher than the cost of dying from severe diseases of vital organs." A patient can run up expenses of $250,000 before getting a liver transplant, Starzl points out. Nevertheless, the prices of organ transplants remain staggering: heart transplants cost somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 (Clark's hospital bill was $200,000, not counting $9,000 for the artificial heart, $7,400 for its pump, and the $3,000 or so per year that it would have...
...organized to save them. At one of the Humana press conferences last week, a young woman named Theresa Garrison sat wearing a T shirt that said HELP US HELP AMIE LIVE. Amie Garrison, 5, of Clarksville, Ind., was born without bile ducts, which drain bile out of the liver, and she will die unless she gets a liver transplant. A country-and-western band has so far helped raise $20,000, but the Garrisons also need publicity to find a liver donor. Both Indiana Senators are assisting. To further promote Amie's cause, the Garrisons hope she can join President...
...there are at least 150 other Amies around the country who are hoping for liver transplants, and the need for other organs runs into many thousands. Medical insurance firms generally decline payment for such operations on the ground that they are still experimental, though Blue Cross of California has paid between $95,000 and $100,000 for each of two heart transplants this year. The prospect of the Federal Government taking over the financing is none too cheering either, since the Social Security system is already staggering under a burden of an estimated $85 billion in annual medical costs...
...terms of the poor, the comparisons look even worse. "We are not giving basic medical care to people in the inner cities," says Tom Preston, chief of cardiology at the Pacific Medical Center in Seattle. A liver transplant of the kind that little Amie Garrison needs would finance a year's operation by a San Francisco inner-city clinic that provides 30,000 office visits in that time. Says Harmon Smith, a professor of moral theology at Duke: "I don't understand the fascination with these absurd, bizarre experiments when we have babies born every...