For a couple of years I have been mulling over an idea to increase live donor donations. I have one mechanism that would only work in a very large setting - like in a large corporation.
Companies that pay for health coverage have an incentive to keep costs down. I forget the exact details (nor do I really care) but I think companies are required to keep ESRD (kidney failure) patients on their on health plans for a certain period of time until they can be transferred to Medicare (where ESRD is covered for people of any age.)
If these large companies can arrange healthy, willing employees to donate kidneys to other people in the company in need of a kidney, it would probably save them a lot of money, create tremendous good-will among employees, and probably make for great PR campaign, as well.
Again, large corporations' ESRD costs are astronomical so they have a large financial incentive to keep them in check - and what better way than making a sick employee healthy.
See this old post for this astronomical amount of money that could be saved by utilizing transplants instead of dialysis.
Eli dov,
ReplyDeleteFirst thing comes to mind is this .... Ok, so you're encouraging kidney donation to meet current kidney transplantation needs for without them lots of folks will needlessly die. Question: of these folks currently waiting, how many are already one kidney patients as opposed to two kidney patients?
What about this concern ... Let's suppose in this mega corporation of yours wherein the corporate culture is promoting kidney donation, one thousand let's say from the employee roster of fifty thousand have opted for it and a thousand lives are saved. Great!
What is the currrent intel on how well transplantees (is that a word? ) are doing down the road: one year, five, ten? Besides being not dead, are they living life well? Are there instances of organ rejection? If so, how many per thousand?
Could there ever arrive a statistical disaster where the number of one kidney tranplantees are suffering from failure thereby escalating costs to health care higher to what they had been before these donations were made?
Alan busch
Alan,
ReplyDelete1. Mayo Clinic, among other venerable institutions have done long term safety for live donors and after a very long period if time, it is still exceedingly safe for the donors.
2. Most people seeking donations have 2 poorly functioning kidneys although obviously, people in other situations need kidneys as well.
3. Live donor kidney donations recipients consistently have the longest life expectancy compared to their peers on dialysis or people who received cadaver donations. They also tend to be the healthiest, have a higher quality of life, and have a lower chance of rejection compared to cadaver donations [and also compared to dialysis patients, save the chance of rejection which does not apply.]
4. I don't think this will ever cause the costs of healthcare to skyrocket. That is practically impossible b/c even if they suffer organ rejection, they could go back onto dialysis, where most transplant patients came from to begin with; so I don't see the costs being higher. The available stats suggest, though, costs will be significantly reduced and quality of life improved.