As the mother of a daughter with cystic fibrosis, I worry that one day my youngest child may need an organ transplant to save her life, as do so many cystic fibrosis patients. That’s one reason why I’m grateful that Congress is taking legislative action to reform the organ procurement system in ways that should increase the number of organs successfully transplanted.
Recently, the House Energy and Commerce Committee marked up a series of legislative proposals, one of which relates to organ donation. The bipartisan bill, sponsored by Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN) and Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL), would allow federal officials to use a competitive bidding process for the logistical elements of the nation’s organ transplant network.
For nearly four decades, the United Network for Organ Sharing has held a monopoly on administering the organ transplant network. Recent congressional oversight has indicated that UNOS suffers from serious shortcomings, which in many cases have put patient care in jeopardy.
Last summer, a Senate Finance Committee report revealed that UNOS is failing to supervise the 56 organizations that handle organ procurement in their respective regions. Of more than 1,000 complaints UNOS received over a decade, some involving such egregious errors as staff throwing a donated kidney in the trash, the majority were never referred to UNOS’s standards committee. And of the 1,118 total complaints, only one resulted in an adverse action disclosed to the general public.
News organizations have examined how the organ transplant system fails patients by improperly discarding healthy organs in ways that cause patients to die unnecessarily while waiting on transplant lists. Despite these persistent problems, UNOS seems incapable of reforming itself, going so far as to stonewall congressional subpoenas and requests for documents during the Senate Finance Committee investigation.
Thankfully, however, lawmakers in both parties are taking action. In March, the Biden administration announced steps to modernize the organ transplant network, creating new data dashboards so that patients can see the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of organ procurement organizations. These efforts build on measures enacted by former President Donald Trump’s administration, which sought to incentivize organ donation and end the monopolies granted to the 56 organ procurement organizations.
The Bucshon-Kelly bill that the Energy and Commerce Committee approved would continue these efforts. It would allow the Biden administration to contract out some of UNOS’s technological functions — a step the administration says it wants to take. Doing so would mean that the national organ transplant network would no longer rely upon old, glitchy technology that has proven unreliable and remains a cybersecurity threat.
When it comes to the commonsense reforms the Bucshon-Kelly bill embodies, they can’t happen soon enough. Approximately 6,000 Americans die every year while waiting for an organ transplant — roughly 16 per day. To have patients die unnecessarily because of inefficiencies in our organ transplant network is both a tragedy for each of these families and a national outrage.
Changing the organ transplant system will improve, and in many cases save, patients’ lives. As a conservative, I would also add that reforming the organ transplant system could save taxpayers billions, primarily by reducing Medicare spending on patients with kidney failure. In short, the reforms contained in the Bucshon-Kelly bill will help patients and taxpayers alike. Congress can’t pass them soon enough.