Welcome to part V of a series of posts highlighting discussions of organ donation on the Taboo Trades podcast. So far, I’ve discussed Imminent Death Donation, The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation, Kidney To Share, Kidneys and Challenge Trials, and Kidneys with Sally Satel.
Today, I want to discuss Ending the Kidney Shortage with Frank McCormick. Frank has been tireless in his research and advocacy efforts on ending the kidney shortage. Frank is an economist, and the author of numerous articles focused on the shortage of kidneys for transplantation. He is retired from the Bank of America where he was Vice-president and Director of U.S. Economic and Financial Research.
In this episode, we discuss Projecting the Economic Impact of Compensating Living Kidney Donors in the United States: Cost-Benefit Analysis Demonstrates Substantial Patient and Societal Gains, co-authored with Philip J. Held, Glenn Chertow, Thomas G. Peters, and John P. Roberts. It is published in Value in Health and is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152201957X/
As Frank summarizes the message he'd like to get across in this podcast:
The big message is that the problem is much greater than it's generally acknowledged. For instance, the government agency, the Health Resources Service Administration, estimates that the shortage of all organs is killing about 19 people a day. And what they're doing is just looking at people on the waiting list who have died, not those who have been removed for the waiting list because they are in poor health, or the people who never get to the waiting list as youth. So that is a real low ball estimate. We think about 110 people a day die because of the kidney shortage. So that's the first big thing. . . And the second point is that we can solve the problem. We can save all those lives by a relatively small investment by the government, which would, because of the savings in the long run, would save them money. So from a rational point of view, it's hard to, at least from our point of view, argue it. against those two facts.
Listen to Ending the Kidney Shortage here or in the embedded player below (or on apple, Spotify, and the other usual suspects).