Organ Transplants

Peter Van DorenTheWashington Postrecentlyreported on a congressional hearing about the system that procures and delivers organs for human transplantation in the United States. Organ procurement organizations (OPOs) have government contracts that make them monopoly providers of such services. No OPO has ever lost its contract regardless of performance.Regulation has published several book reviews and articles that analyze and critique the current organ procurement system. Alvin Roth is a Nobel ‐​prize winning economist whose work helped design the current organ matching system. Phil Murray explains that work in thisreview. Roth understands that hospitals, because they earn revenue on transplants, have an incentive to keep their “easy‐​to‐​match” pairs outside the official organ matching system and refer the “hard‐​to‐​match” pairs to the system. The problem, of course, is that when transplant centers withhold easy‐​to‐​match pairs the number of people nationwide who can be matched is reduced . The problem can be fixed by rewarding hospitals with more matches based on the number of easy matches they refer to the system. But Roth recognizes this is not likely to happen because hospitals would have to admit that they are “strategic players in competition with one another,” which would contradict the non‐​profit ethos of the current system.Another anomaly in the existing system isdescribed by Ike Brannon. Some transplant candid...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs