Word: transplantation
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...Cigna in May 2008 after he became disillusioned with the for-profit health-insurance industry, decided to end his silence. (Potter's conversion was prompted in part by the 2007 case of 17-year-old Natalie Sarkisyan, who died shortly after Cigna initially denied her coverage for a liver transplant. Then presidential candidate John Edwards used the case as an example of why health-care reform was necessary...
More than 80,000 people are currently awaiting a kidney transplant in the U.S. The climb to the top of the waiting list takes anywhere from one to six years, and the delay is both agonizing and potentially deadly - each year, some 6% of patients die while waiting to be matched with a donor. Given those grim statistics, some argue kidney sales should be legalized. Paying in the ballpark of $100,000, Matas argues, is a better economic bet than our current system, in which Medicare pays for indefinite dialysis treatment - which is both costly and debilitating - for nearly...
...motives are purely altruistic. U.S. hospitals run donor-recipient couples through a series of interviews, including a meeting with a social worker, who checks to make sure that no money is exchanging hands and ensures that both parties understand the details of the surgery. Dr. Arthur Matas, renal-transplant director at the University of Minnesota's medical school, says that hospitals ask unrelated donor-transplant couples how they met each other, but that there is no "hard rule" or set of fixed guidelines to help authorities determine if the donor is receiving payment...
...healthy enough to withstand a four-hour operation. You must be free of disease - HIV, hepatitis or cancer will disqualify you - and, of course, you need to have the same blood type as the recipient. It takes an average of three months for hospitals to assess and approve a transplant. Kidney donation is a major commitment - you can't drive or lift anything for six weeks, and it can be over a month before you're ready to return to work. (See pictures of crime in Middle America...
Rosenbaum would be the first person to face federal organ-trafficking charges in the U.S. According to investigators, he called himself a "matchmaker" who connected those in need of a transplant with those in need of cash. Rosenbaum allegedly found sellers in Israel, where a network of operatives targeted recent immigrants to the country. He is said to have paid donors an average of $10,000 for their services and charged recipients more than ten times that amount...