Associated Press December 17, 2019 10:24 AM
The U.S. government proposed new rules Tuesday
to increase organ transplants—steps to make it easier for the living to donate
and to make sure that organs from the deceased don't go to waste.
The proposals come after President Donald Trump
in July ordered a revamping of the nation's care for kidney disease that
included spurring more transplants of kidneys and other organs.
Thousands die every year while waiting for a
transplant. There are many reasons for the organ shortage. An Associated Press
analysis recently found some of the groups that collect organs at death secure
donors at half the rate of others—leaving behind potentially usable organs. And
other studies suggest people hold off volunteering to be a living donor because
they can't afford the time off work.
Tuesday's proposals address those two
challenges. If the rules become final, they would:
• Allow living donors to be reimbursed for lost
wages and child care or elder care expenses incurred during their
hospitalization and recovery. Still to be determined is exactly who will
qualify.
Currently, the transplant recipient's insurance
pays the donor's medical bills, but donors are out of work for weeks
recuperating and not all employers allow some form of paid time off.
• Hold the "organ procurement organizations"
that collect deceased donations to stricter standards. Rather than
self-reporting their success, each organization's donation and transplantation
rates would be calculated using federal death records that show the entire pool
of potential donors each has to draw from.
For the first time, that change would allow the
government to rank organ procurement organization performance. The proposal
would require the government to do yearly evaluations and push low-performing
organizations to match those doing a better job.
The rules are open for public comment for 60
days before taking effect.
"Our broken system of procuring organs and
supporting kidney donors costs thousands of American lives each year," HHS
Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.
More than 113,000 people are on the U.S. waiting
list for a transplant.
It's not clear how big an impact the new rules
would have, but a 2017 study led by University of Pennsylvania researchers
calculated that a better-functioning system to secure deceased donors could
produce up to 28,000 more organs a year.
And people lucky enough to receive a kidney or
part of a liver from a living donor not only cut years off their transplant
wait, but those organs tend to survive longer. Yet fewer than 7,000 of the
36,529 transplants performed last year were from living donors.
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