Deleted

LOL

The Body Brokers: Part 1- Assembly Line

Donors don't realize they are fueling a lucrative business

By Mark Katches,
William Heisel and Ronald Campbell
April 16, 2000

Maybe it's relevant, it's only 9 years old. :shrug:

http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/kat/org_01bodybrokerspart1.html

:popcorn:

Just wondering.

I just wondered if other people knew anything about those things I listed.

if the medical establishment that refuses me care will exploit my body. Fuck 'em.

I'll keep all my organs thank you very much.

to lead a diminished and shortened life because of my lack of access to health care. It seems cruel to receive care only to have my organs harvested. I refuse to play that game. I don't have to.

The cost of my organs is meaningful access to health care. I don't think that's too much to ask. Especially since it impacts the final quality of my organ product.

Couple hundred thousand people die each year waiting for an organ.
Lets see if we can double that number.
See the insurance companies lose because now they don't have to pay for expensive transplant procedures and instead their "liabilities" die off cheaply..... er wait that doesn't really work.

Who care though. I think we can do it. Lets shoot for 400,000 dead people waiting for Organs by 2012. Yes we can kill them off.

In return we can be put into the ground with more organs that are no longer useful to us.
Lets go us!

Fuck people who were too unlucky to need an organ transplant.
Hell if they are rich they likely can go to India and buy one but if they are middle class or poor well fuck em.

that the insurance companies are the only ones responsible for our fucked up health care system. IMHO that is a very simplistic view. You can throw some responsibility on every soingle participant in the health care system - and on the profit motive that underlies the system.

I am a throwaway without enough value in this society to be deserving of even basic physical health care. I don't invest in those who don't support and advance my interests.

Need an organ and can't get one? Well, golly gee, welcome to my fucking world. Congratulations. You may not get an organ but odds are before you got on that organ donor list you got enough physical care to know you needed an organ. Sorry about you but really nobody owes you an organ. Individuals and families who chose to donate organs do so out of the benevolence of their heart. Some of us do not wish to donate our organs. Lots of reasons for that - including a conscious choice not to participate in a system that does not include us and fails to provide us even minimal care.

Choosing not to donate doesn't hurt the health care industry - it hurts people like my daughter who was born with an abnormal immune system. Her body is attacking her bile ducts because it doesn't recognize them as part of her body - in response they build up a thick fibrous wall around them so they cannot properly handle the bile, an essential part of cleaning the toxins from her body. As a result, her liver is slowly dying off. Once it reaches the point of no return, she will die without a gift from someone like you. There are no artificial livers or even temporary substitutes, like dialysis machines for kidneys, than can perform the work of the liver for even a short time to sustain her life.

It is, obviously, your choice - but if you are making that choice to spite the horrendous access we have to health care in this country, your bullet will hit the wrong target.

about your daughter. I really am. If I knew my organs would be useful and compatible for her I would be willing to donate and designate them for her benefit. Unfortunately I am not permitted to do that. Instead, I have to trust a system that does not value me to determine who is and is not deserving of my benevolence. I have known more than one person who was in need of an organ transplant who was refused consideration for a transplant. FWIW, one of those was refused consideration because she did not have health insurance and lacked the personal financial means to obtain long-term care in insure that there was no rejection of any transplanted organ. Her name was Barbara. She's dead now. She didn't live to see her kids finish high school or marry or have a family of their own.

I haven't looked at the health insurance requirements for recipients - I know anyone bad enough off to reqire a transplant likely qualifies for SSI or SSD (my daughter will qualify in at least two categories when she reaches that stage). But that is another catch 22 - after transplant, she would be expected to be well enough to no longer qualify - but given the disruption that any kind of illness severe enough to require a transplant causes it is unlikely that anyone pre-transplant would be able to manage insurance (or financial stability) on their own in advance. That may have changed - our neighbor (who doesn't have access to much money) just had a double lung transplant - it apparently didn't keep them from allocating lungs to her.

We have a minor version of that catch-22 for the fall. My daughter is not well enough to carry a full time load - but if she drops down to part time she no longer qualifies to be covered under my health insurance - and since she has an illness that will require a transplant (or will result in any of three different cancers) she is not eligible for private insurance (except in the high risk pool - which as of last week costs $14,000 a year). Not likely she will be able to afford it as a high school graduate and college dropout who is too ill to work full time.

I've been talking to everyone I can think of to talk to to try to get the political powers to be to understand that access to health care must not be linked to health, wealth, employment, or ability to maintain status as a full time student. (And a public health option is not even a step in that direction - all it does is create a competing just-as-costly government insurance plan. What we need is Medicaid/Medicare like plan for all.)

deserves far better options than what she faces. So do you.

I'm convinced that the only people who really understand our health care crisis are those who have experienced - or who have observed someone close to them experience - the ruthless manner in which health care is allocated. Without that experience health care is simply an intellectual issue.

I am in complete agreement regarding your observations about high risk pools, conditions of access to health care and public health care options. I too spend considerable time and effort advocating regarding access to health care.

I pray that your daughter will be able to secure the care she needs.

You deserve better options, as well. Let's hope they are coming before the current system kills us off.

dies while the family decides and the organs can't be used. I have never heard of the denial of pain meds. "someone makes a million dollars"? where is your evidence? If it's the insurance company, they do that with everything they do. It's part of our crazy medical system. I'm a nurse I've seen many kids post transplant when they have left the hospital when I worked home care. Organ donating is great!

until the parents could adjust to the idea that there was no hope. His eyes, heart, liver, kidneys and other organs are now living on in some other little child who did have hope. We have found comfort in knowing that those other children live.

pathansen please do just the minimal amount of research before posting something.

Don

:rofl:

I mean usually there is some truth mixed in with the falsehoods but here you managed to achieve a 100% bullshit factor. Quite impressive.

Did you get these remarkable "facts" in a chain email?

I am no expert but this sounds a little 'urban mythy' to me.

1. Since transplants are done in hospitals by highly trained surgeons and their staffs and they are all there to make a living I am sure that they are very costly (not to mention insurance companies taking their cut). Does somebody profit $1,000,000.00 I find that questionable mostly because that number is one of those that people use when they want to have a big effect 'can you believe it he made over a million on that transplant!'. Yes money is made that is the way the current system works.

2. Another sophistic opinion probably somewhat based on the first fallacious point. If A, somebody can make a lot of money then obviously B, they have an incentive to kill people. I truly believe that if surgeons and other physicians were taking it into there own hands to let 'donor patients' die it would become very obvious. Many people don't accept their loved ones dying very well to begin with if many of them started dying in questionable situations I think these people would raise hell. I also reject the idea implicit in this that the vast majority of physicians and medical people are only in it for the money.

3. This is a totally misreading of the situation. An example, the patient is brain dead their family has agreed to 'pull the plug' but the patient is a donor and they are trying to line up things so the organs can be harvested. They will keep the person 'alive' until they are ready to proceed. They aren't taking organs from potentially savable patients because they are donors and alive they are keeping them 'alive' (that is heart pumping, oxygen going into the blood the basics of keeping the organs from degrading) just long enough to get the donated organs.

4. This is a 'somebody says' thing and I look at those with a jaundiced eye. If they had actual, verifiable examples then that might be different but then my question would be why aren't these people again raising hell to get it to stop. I would suspect there could be reasons for denying certain kinds of pain killers in certain situations though in my experience they seem to hand out painkillers these days like their candy.

5. Sorry I am an agnostic/atheist I don't really have much to say on this other than I believe the whole soul thing is mythical in nature and therefore not much of a concern.

Now having addressed the points you listed I would add that obviously when dealing with the end of somebodies life and doing what in many ways is the very unnatural thing of harvesting their organs to be transplanted into another human being there are many dangers. The oversight and control of these procedures must be strongly enforced. Those that do step over the line should be severally punished. Where ever you saw these points it appears to me the author probably has a problem with transplanting organs to begin with and then made up points to try and discourage people from donating. On the other hand I have been known to be wrong on the rare occasion if you think these points maybe valid do some research and let us all know what you find.

In fact there was a doctor charged (he wasn't convicted) with giving the patient too many pain meds so the patient would die faster in order to remove the organs.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/564066.html

As to point #5, it really doesn't matter what somebody else believes. If it is what YOU believe you will act accordingly, otherwise it's completely irrelevant. And of course, if you do have a soul, a single human lifespan will be a very short period of time.

and, as usual, it's bullshit. That's why we have Snopes. Checking unsourced stuff is always a good idea before posting it on discussion forums. It'll keep you from being embarassed by the ensuing posts.

the posters above were deservedly hard on you , but organ donation is incredibly important. What you posted are some of the reasons people are afraid to become organ donors. The discussion about how those fears are completely unfounded in reality is extremely valuable. I hope you put back what you deleted.

Good form. :-)

a post that was deleted.

What you did was important. I'm glad the OP was deleted, because the last thing the organ donor program needs is false urban legends circling around as "truth".

What is the purpose of deleting the question? Now a whole bunch of people are responding to the OP that no longer exists.

And if we ever meet, I'd gladly show you my driver's license.

I am a third generation organ donor, and my daughter is a fourth generation donor - and was recently (after she made the decision to be a donor) diagnosed with a disease that means she will also likely need a liver transplant. (My grandparents' donation has already occurred. The remaining generations have signed the appropriate forms - which for my parents goes far beyond donation for the sake of directly saving lives.)

1. No one makes money off a donor's body parts. There are, of course, costs associated with the many tests that must be run to make sure that the organ being donated will not harm the person who receives it, to retrieve the organs, to transport them to where they are needed, and so on. Those costs are paid to the various laboratories who run the tests, the workers who draw the labs, the equipment used to run the tests, the doctors who remove the organs, and the transportation used to convey the organs to those who need them. I don't know the costs, but since a single person can donate 50 or so organs, I can imagine the costs would be significant.

2. Emergency care is not provided by the doctors involved in transplantation. The focus of the emergency doctors is keeping you alive. http://www.snopes.com/medical/emergent/donor.asp

3. No organs are removed before you are dead (unless you choose to be a living donor for a kidney, liver, blood, or bone marrow, for example). Death, by medical standards, is the cessation of brain activity or or cardiac activity. The cessation of brain activity is complete and irreversible cessation - far beyond the arguably questionable status of Terri Schaivo. There are numerous tests that must be done to establish this, including the relatively unscientific attempt of removing artificial respiration and watching for any attempt to breathe - if there is any, you are not dead and your organs cannot be donated. Once your brain is dead, respiration and cardiac activity is continued if there is a chance of organ donation because to do otherwise would destroy the organs by depriving them of oxygen. Respiration is continued mechanically; cardiac activity is continued by a drug.

4. Again, treatment is provided by a doctor or team of doctors intent on saving your life. Only after those attempts fail are any decisions related to transplant made. If drugs have damaged the organs, they will not be used - as noted above each organ has a separate set of tests that must be run before the organ may be used.

5. If your religion believes this - then fine, don't donate. Most don't - organ donation is consistent with most religions including Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and most branches of Judaism.

People who desperately need organs to stay alive die on the waiting list daily. Please do not discourage organ donation based on nonsense like you have posted above. Here is a good source of information. http://www.donatelife.net/UnderstandingDonation/

I was an organ donor long before I knew my daughter might need a liver - once I am no longer home, the best use of my physical remains is to use what can be used to sustain life, sustain life, to improve the quality of life, to educate physicians about the diseases I died from, or to train physicians-to-be in the intricacy of human anatomy.