I promised that I would talk some more about the articles in the Law & Contemporary Problems volume, Organs & Inducements, that was just published. So today I’d like to talk about my article with Mike Rees, Reverse Transplant Tourism.
The short version is that Reverse Transplant Tourism (“RTT”) is a new form of cross-border kidney paired donation. Such kidney exchanges, in which patients with willing but incompatible living kidney donors exchange their donors’ kidneys, have already become common in the United States. But RTT takes the standard kidney exchange a step further, by expanding it to poor patients outside of the United States who have a willing donor, but who are not able to afford a transplant.
We label the procedure “reverse transplant tourism” for a few reasons, intending a play on words. One meaning is literal – in transplant tourism, patients from rich countries typically travel to poorer ones seeking a donor willing to trade a kidney for cash payments. Under RTT, patients from poor countries travel to rich ones, in order to obtain a transplant that could not be performed in their home country, due to their poverty and the limitations of their national healthcare system. In addition, RTT could “reverse” many of the negative effects of illegal transplant tourism by avoiding its organ-deficit problem (rather than a net outflow of kidneys from the developing to developed world, RTT matches kidney inflows to outflows) and by building on the system of protections for donors and recipients already present in the U.S transplant system. In the process, RTT helps an ailing American patient whose willing donor is biologically incompatible.
To illustrate, let’s begin with the common kidney swap. Suppose that Amanda wants to donate a kidney to Bob but is unable to do so, either because their blood types do not match or because there is some other incompatibility. Another pair, Carlos and Diana, faces the same problem. However, Carlos is compatible with Bob, and Amanda is compatible with Diana. By swapping, as illustrated in figure 1, the kidney swap enables two transplants, providing both Bob and Diana with a compatible kidney. Although kidney exchange began with this type of two-pair exchange, longer exchanges and chains of transplants have recently come to dominate.
Imagine now, however, that Carlos and Diana, rather than facing biological incompatibility, face a different problem: They are poor and live in a country where poverty is a barrier to transplantation – let’s assume Mexico, which does not pay for all of the necessary costs of transplantation. As illustrated in figure 2, RTT can help both Bob and Diana, allowing each to receive a kidney that they otherwise could not—in Bob’s case because of his biological incompatibility with Amanda, and in Diana’s case because of her poverty and lack of adequate health care coverage.
Because transplantation is much less expensive than dialysis, RTT both saves money and transplants two patients who otherwise could not obtain one – in one case because of biological incompatibility and, in the other, due to lack of access to health care coverage.
In my next post, I’ll provide some more details regarding RTT, explain why it ultimately saves money, and discuss the applicability of NOTA. In the meantime, you can read the full paper here.
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Reverse Transplant Tourism Goes Live!!
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