President Joe Biden is set to sign into law a new bill that the White House says will save lives for Americans in need of an organ transplant.
Biden on Friday will sign a bipartisan piece of legislation that will reform the organ transplant system, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, and waiting process as more than 100,000 people await a transplant. The bill passed the House and Senate on a bipartisan basis in July.
“Everybody knows the system has been broken for years with heartbreaking consequences. Now with the president’s signature, we are taking significant steps to improve it,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.
The law, Jean-Pierre said, “will break up the current monopoly system harnessing competition to allow HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) to contract with the best entities to provide a more efficient system for the people it serves.”
From how the bill reads, the system is already privatized and has been run by one single non-profit for the past 40 or so years. Now it can be operated by more than one organization, but I can’t immediately find information on if the the non-profit organization requirement has been changed or not.
UNOS has issues, but the organization is not the cause of most of them. The lack of competition is not the source of their problems. They need a modernized infrastructure, and there should be more transparency in the policy decisions. We should expand access to transplants and improve healthcare across the board.
This bill claims to fix all of those things, but doesn’t. It merely removes the guardrails in contract allocation and amounts. It won’t be immediate, but give it ten years, and the system will be ridiculously corrupt, incompetent, and entirely partisan.
Like everything else the government does,