Bishop Chris: Financial Assistance for Live Organ Donors Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBishop Chris: Financial Assistance for Live Organ Donors Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5777. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS BISHOP (National): I move That the Financial Assistance for Live Organ Donors Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill.I would like to start by acknowledging my friend and colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse who first proposed this bill as his own member’s bill and whose reasons for doing so are similar to my own which I will touch on in a second. I would also like to acknowledge Dr Cam Calder who took up the bill and kept it on the ballot after Michael’s much-deserved promotion to the ministerial ranks. It would also be appropriate to acknowledge the efforts of Dr Jackie Blue who previously attempted to improve organ donation legislation through her own member’s bill in 2007 and to acknowledge the tireless campaigning of people like in particular Andy Tookey who support this bill and continue to support the cause of organ donation. I have had preliminary indications of support for the bill from many members in the House and I thank them for that.This is a very focused and specific bill that aims to deal mainly with two issues surrounding live organ donation. The first purpose of the bill is to adequately compensate altruistic New Zealanders who through the goodness of their hearts choose to donate an organ to a friend a loved one or even a stranger. The current compensation amounts to the equivalent of the sickness benefit and inadequately recognises and supports the hardship these individuals face when they make the choice to give up an organ in order to save a life. The bill would allow donors to be paid up to 80 percent of their average wage for 12 weeks of recovery along with other childcare payments.The second purpose of the bill is to reduce the financial barriers to becoming a live organ donor. Although the reasons for New Zealand’s low organ donation rates are varied and many one significant barrier is the financial hardship a donor suffers through lost wages and other associated costs of recovery. This bill will seek to address that issue by ensuring organ donors are supported in the same way that we support injury and recovery through the ACC system. This bill replaces and improves upon the 2005 ministerial direction and it is only right and proper in my view that we elevate such an important issue which impacts relatively few New Zealanders but affects us all.Like many members’ bills and like the Hon Michael Woodhouse before me I was motivated to take up this cause after meeting the very people who have been affected by it. During one of my first candidate meetings in 2014 I spoke with 68-year-old Sharon van der Gulik who had been living with renal failure for more than 2 years. She could barely walk and needed 15 hours of dialysis a week. Her story will be familiar to many New Zealanders and like many in her situation her best option was a live kidney transplant. She was at one point given just 2 weeks to live and dialysis had become so awful that she could not think of continuing treatment past the age of 70.Fortunately for Sharon van der Gulik her incredibly brave 27-year-old grandson Matt was able to donate a kidneyto her. But it was tough on him. The $206 or so paid by Work and Income was not enough to cover half his mortgage and Mrs van der Gulik herself had to help keep Matt financially afloat. Mrs van der Gulik and her grandson are in my view exactly the kind of brave people this bill attempts to support through proper compensation. There are numerous other examples of organ donors and donees around the country and I am sure members will have their own stories from their own constituencies.I think it is wrong that at the moment live organ donors are essentially penalised for their altruism facing a large loss of income even though their actions save lives and contribute to a healthier New Zealand. Moreover the current system in many ways actually favours the wealthy. If you have a relative who can afford to take time off work and make the financial sacrifice is entailed in donating an organ to you and they are a match then you have a good shot of getting that organ. But if you have someone who is a match but cannot afford to take time off work to donate an organ to you then you are obviously in a less advantageous position. That is an inequitable situation; this bill improves upon it.The second issue the bill seeks to address is New Zealand’s low organ donation rates. It is relatively common knowledge I think for members in the House that our rate of organ donation in New Zealand is low by international standards. It is about half that of Australia and it is well below Spain which is the world leader when it comes to organ donation. There are more than 550 New Zealanders waiting for an organ transplant and 450 of these people are waiting for a kidney transplant. People waiting for a heart transplant a lung transplant or a liver transplant may die without a successful transplant and those waiting for a kidney transplant lead lives restricted by long-term dialysis treatment which is very debilitating.There are many reasons for this lamentable situation and the Government actually does have quite a comprehensive and wide-ranging work programme to address that. That programme is starting to work. The numbers of New Zealanders receiving an organ transplant rose from 176 in 2013 to 217 in 2014 which is a 23 percent increase. This includes an increase in kidney donations from live donors as well but it is clear we must do more.So one barrier to people being willing to donate is the financial sacrifice they are forced to make. This bill reduces that sacrifice considerably and I have described it as a small but useful contribution to the Government’s wider work programme to improve our organ donation rates. In the words of Elsie Howard who was on the front page of the Dominion Post recently and who donated a kidney to her father: “You’re being penalised for working and then doing this for someone … If you want people to step up and donate make it worth their while. Don’t make it so hard to do something for somebody else.” That quote really encapsulates what this bill is all about.The bill will have a small fiscal cost but I believe that taxpayers will be better off if it passes into law if it works as intended and if it does increase organ donation rates. The reality is that organ transplants save the taxpayer a lot of money. This is good economics. A recent study by Elizabeth Prasad of the University of Canterbury indicates that it costs taxpayers $281000 to treat a 50-year-old male with dialysis over his expected lifetime at a 7 percent discount rate. That compares with $149800 if he was given a transplant. There are therefore very large fiscal gains for the taxpayer and for the Government from increasing organ donation rates.In conclusion this bill greatly increases the support for those brave New Zealanders who every year sacrifice part of themselves to save the lives of others. It will also go some way to removing the financial barriers to live organ donation and help address aspects of New Zealand’s low organ donation rate. It recognises rightly the large commitment these altruistic New Zealanders have to those in need and acknowledges how grateful we are as a country to them. Let me close my speech by paraphrasing the former colleague of my colleagues here Dr Jackie Blue who said during the first reading of her own organ donation bill 8 years ago that we propose many pieces of legislation that deal with Government efficiency updating legislation and making the lives of New Zealanders easier but very few can lay claim to improving the quality of life or even save the lives of New Zealanders. This bill is one of them. She was talking about her bill but I believe that is equally true of this bill and on that note I commend the bill to the House.