Medical tourism is a growing trend in medical care where individuals can travel overseas to get medical care for a fraction of the price of hospital care in the US, and often with much greater care and comfort. While there are issues over medical care and legal liability to be considered, there is reason to consider it as a marketplace mechanism to drive better quality and lower price.
This development has taken a grim turn, though, with the rise of international trafficking in organ transplantation. The reason for this development is clear: there is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation in the US. About 6,500 individuals in the US die every year awaiting transplantation, and there were almost 100,000 candidates for the estimated 29,000 organs that became available in 2006. Organ transplantation has become safer and less expensive – a kidney transplant, for example, has a high success rate and costs much less than a single year of dialysis. And the quality of life is much better with a transplant than with dialysis.
There are plenty of potential organs for transplantation in the US, but the vast majority are cremated or buried instead of transplanted. Virtually every religion supports organ donation and transplantation, but administrative obstacles and failure to request donation by medical authorities make for increasing shortages. Dramatically increasing the supply of organs for transplantation is as easy as making it an “opt-out” to decline donation rather than having to “opt-in” through finding and completing an organ donor authorization.
Instead, transplant candidates are increasingly going overseas to buy organs from indigent locals. The World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/ethics/topics/human_transplant/en/
reports that people in Pakistan, Egypt, India and the Philippines are being persuaded to sell their organs to a broker, often for as little as $1,000. These individuals receive inadequate medical care and risk death as a result, as described in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Associations:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/288/13/1589/
This would be illegal in the US and most of the developed world.
We can debate the ethics of paying donors for their organs, but we are instead preying on vulnerable populations as the price of our discomfort in confronting the issues of death and organ harvesting in the US.
#1 by Josef Woodman on April 3rd, 2007
I wholeheartedly agree with you that preying on vulnerable populations for organ transplants is unethical and should not be supported by any government or individual. However, it’s important to note that organ transplants comprise an infinitesimal part of the total medical tourism sector, and most patients traveling abroad for treatment are well within the ethical bounds for common procedures such as dental, cosmetic, cardiovascular, orthopedics, et al. I would also point out that not all countries practicing organ transplants do so unethically. For example, the Albert Einstein Jewish Hospital in Brazil and the National Heart Center in Singapore both perform transplants (liver and heart respectively), are fully accredited, and are held to the highest ethical and procedural standards. Our newly published “Patients Beyond Borders: Everybody’s Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism” provides well-documented information on dozens of excellent, above-board choices for organ transplant candidates. While the subject of unethical organ transplants has its place, and aggressive steps should be taken to stop such practices, we do not wish to see legitimage candidates for transplants discouraged amidst a spate of sensationalism on this important matter.