Word: transplanted
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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...
According to Roberts, the concern of the task force is to limit the financial scale of the organ transplant business. The committee recommends a "no new facilities" policy in which the state would use the institutions, the hospitals, to restrict the number of operations performed. "Creating a limited capacity," in which "access [is] a function of medical condition" not of ability to pay, is the solution. Such restrictions would also ensure that other state-funded programs are not strangled by high costs of transplants...
...task force is choosing among decision-making processes. Their choice is a practically informed moral judgment between what they consider better or worse ways of deciding how to allocate organ transplants. The strongest negative implication of the "limited capacity" scenario is an increased possibility that a patient who might benefit from a transplant could be denied one through lack of funds. The task force has decided that other Medicaid programs are more important; perhaps they are, though it should be noted, for example, that the kind of heart defect suffered by Baby Fae kills a substantial number of infants...
CLEARLY VERY real limits on available organs and funds require some compromise on the issue of transplants, yet the limited capacity approach can be only part of the solution. The issue of organ transplant distinguishes itself from other pressing medical controversies, like abortion, because it creates a competition that entails the somewhat morbid prospect of the buying and selling of organs, and thus lives, for profit. The "limited capacity" scenario allows for "retrospective review," i.e. hindsight, because it slows down transplant technology. However, this slowdown could actually limit the possibility of resolving the competition by removing the constraints--by developing...
...moment, the question remains of how to judge who gets the available transplants. Benefit is not a clear-cut question, yet clearcut decisions must be made. However, it would be neither ethical nor possible to create a central computer-like authority to dole out judgments of patients. The power of organ transplant technology will be controlled by somebody, be they the wealthy patients, the needy patients, the state law makers, the hospitals, or the doctors; we must decide, then, who should control that power...