Via Al Roth comes news of a detailed article in yesterday’s Toledo Blade about the first Reverse Transplant Tourism surgery that I blogged about the other day.
From the news article:
Dr. Rees calls his new program reverse-transplant tourism.
A husband and wife from the Philippines, Jose and Kristine Mamaril, are the first participants to benefit from this innovative system that allowed Mr. Mamaril to receive a life-saving transplant in Toledo from an American donor in Georgia. His wife, who has a coveted blood type, reciprocated by donating a kidney to a man in Minnesota who previously would have had to wait years for a match.
. . .
“In rich countries there’s not enough kidneys for people who have kidney failure, but there is plenty of money to pay for all the transplants. In poor countries, there’s lots of people that need kidney transplants and lots of available donors, but in poor countries they don’t have enough money,” Dr. Rees said.
This new program breaks down some of those barriers and helps bring people with the universal Type O blood into the U.S donor system, while helping someone from another country get access to free medical care.
One year of a kidney patient’s dialysis costs Medicare about $90,000, or nearly triple the $33,000 cost of a kidney transplant, Dr. Rees said. He argues his donor-matching system will ultimately save the federal government and private insurers money because it moves patients with kidney failure, also known as end-stage renal disease, off dialysis sooner.
You can download our recently published article on Reverse Transplant Tourism here.
You can also read my prior posts about RTT:
Reverse Transplant Tourism (cont.)
Reverse Transplant Tourism Goes Live!!
(Photo credit Toledo Blade)
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