Organ Hunters International
This kind of stuff makes me miss the Placebo Journal. I would have done a whole page for a fake television show parody. What is my inspiration? Well, for one, the show House Hunters International. And for another, I have this article in the WSJ:
About 30 euthanasia patients in Canada have donated their organs after death since 2016. On June 3 the Canadian Medical Association issued guidelines for how the process should work. The grim document describes how the organ donation and euthanasia decisions might be disentangled, but allows doctors to raise the possibility of organ donation with assisted-suicide patients. It also clarifies that organ removal should not begin until the patient is medically deceased and the heart has stopped beating.
But some experts quarrel with this restriction. Last year in a New England Journal of Medicine article, two Canadian medical researchers and a Harvard bioethicist argued that it could reduce the quality of donated organs. A superior model, they suggest, could be to kill the patient by removing his organs. After all, the best organs come from live people, like those who donate one of their kidneys.
You can see the slippery slope here, right? It could come to a time where rich Americans would shop the world for the best organ from a living or euthanized patient. Here’s a future episode:
I am not poking fun at any of these people in the pictures above. I am just trying to see the future and it could go bad, real quick.
Or am I overthinking this just for the joke?
Yes ,Human beings will live down to our expectations. Always. No to doctor assisted suicide, no to euthanasia.
If people want to Kill themselves there are multiple ways to do it. Don’t need no help from Doctors, MD or DO. NP’ s or PA’s.
This is actually one of the most slippery, morbid slopes I’ve considered in a long while. The implications are terrifying. We already have people who are afraid to become organ donors because they are concerned doctors will not try as hard to save them as someone who isn’t a donor. I can’t imagine taking organs from people that are not on artificial life support (brain dead) or who have very recently passed. I can see the practicality of having quality organs from a live donor, but death by harvest in today’s environment seems unethical and immoral.
Wonder how far we are from having two different CPT codes – one for harvesting organs before death and one for harvesting after. Wonder which one will have a higher reimbursement schedule – because you know there will be a difference in reimbursement. You’re not going to do something like this if there wasn’t a increase reward for your actions, which in turn motivates individuals to push for different billing codes and reimbursement rates.
I can just imagine the individuals who are formulating their justification that before death harvesting should be reimbursed at a higher rate and how they will downplay the negative consequences of such a proposal.
Will there also be a different charge if you received a organ from a deceased individual or someone still breathing? Should insurance pay a premium for one over the other? I guess it would be similar to getting a rebuilt auto part vs a new part, huh.
I remarked to someone the other day that we do not want doctors to start rationalizing without moral restraint. This has happened before with horrifying results.