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Photo Credit: OrganJet
Photo Credit: OrganJet

Back in June, I published a series of essays about efforts to fly people around the country to give them better access to life-saving organ transplants. For your convenience, I have pulled the three essays together into one PDF. As a teaser, I will remind you of the first few paragraphs of the essay. But if you click on this link, you can get access to the PDF: Your New Liver Is Only a Learjet Away by Peter Ubel.

The forty million dollar Gulfstream jet landed at Memphis International airport in the early morning hours, its schedule hastily arranged earlier that day from Northern California, where the flight originated. Waiting on the tarmac was Dr. James Eason, head of transplant surgery at Methodist University Hospital, who planned on whisking the passenger to the operating room for a liver transplant. The passenger rushed to Memphis not because he lived in Memphis and happened to be out of town when an organ became available, but rather because he knew that flying from his home in Northern California to Tennessee would give him his best chance of receiving a life-saving organ.
You see, the demand for transplantable livers in Northern California far outstrips the supply, meaning there is a decent chance a patient with end-stage liver disease will die before a replacement organ becomes available. But in Tennessee, the number of people waiting for a liver transplants is significantly smaller, per capita, than California, and as a result the supply of transplanted livers is much better matched to the demand for such organs. As a result of these geographic variations in supply and demand, patients in Northern California wait more than six years, on average, for a liver transplant, whereas the majority of patients in Tennessee receive new livers in less than three months.
That’s right: six years versus three months!
The passenger on the Gulfstream that morning was Apple co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. After being told he needed a liver transplant, Jobs had learned about the huge disparity in waiting time between California and Tennessee, and arranged to get placed on the transplant waiting list in both locales, knowing he could fly to whichever location came up with the first available organ. So when he got a call from Memphis explaining that a 20 year old man with a compatible blood type had died in a car crash earlier that day, he summoned his flight crew and made his way to Tennessee.
Steve Jobs walked out of the plane that morning a frail shadow of his former self. Pancreatic cancer had spread to his liver and, without a transplant, he had only weeks or months to live. Thanks to that early morning flight and the talents of his surgeon, Jobs received a transplant later that day and would survive two and a half more years, a time in which he introduced the world to the iPad and to a talking phone assistant named Siri.
It was wonderful for Jobs and his loved ones that he was able to receive a transplant that day. But was it fair that Jobs could afford to charter a jet from California to Tennessee to undergo a transplant, while thousands of equally sick Californians waited at home for livers that didn’t always come in time?

To read the rest of this article, please click on the PDF: Your New Liver Is Only a Learjet Away by Peter Ubel

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