"Who Deserves A Liver? Officials Try To Make Organ Transplants Fairer" - Lenny Bernstein

The people who control transplants in the United States are preparing to consider a way to address the decades-old geographic disparity in liver allocation, changing the way precious organs are distributed and potentially shifting hundreds of livers across state and regional borders. The decision on how to distribute organs has divided the liver transplant world into feuding camps for 15 years: those who favor the current system and those who claim it costs lives. The conflict has sparked accusations of ma­nipu­la­tion of rules, led to lobbying in Congress and prompted more than 60 proposals, all of which have been abandoned. Behind the wrangling over patient care is the fact that transplants provide big money to hospitals.  Sander Florman, MD, director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai and professor of surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said the status quo cannot continue because of the disadvantages it imposes on people in states like New York and California, where waiting lists are long and people have to get extremely sick or die before getting a liver. “I don’t care what the model is. The model can be a circle, a triangle, a neighborhood,” he said. “The point to me is that two people who are equally sick should have equal opportunity to get a liver.”

- Sander Florman, MD, Director, Recaanti/Miller Transplantion Institute, Professor, Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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The Chicago Tribune