If you are a patient in need of a transplant and you live in Tennessee, the average time you spend on the waiting list is about 21 days. If you live in my part of the country, the San Francisco Bay Area, the average waiting time for that same patient is over 300 days. In every part of the country, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that minority candidates wait longer than their white counterparts for available organs. When my good friend Congressman Moakley was diagnosed with hepatitis B and was in need of a liver transplant, his doctors told him to leave Boston and move to Virginia to increase his chances of obtaining a liver. Fairness is half of this fight.
Quality is the other.
There is a lot of money to be made in organ transplants. In fact, in general the lower volume small transplant centers have poorer outcomes than the high volume transplant centers. The fact is, having a transplant center has become the equivalent of health pork. But unlike highway pork, these centers often end up killing patients because they do not do as good a job as the high volume centers. I really think it is immoral for centers who have a lower success rate than the high volume centers to be fighting the Department's regulation.