Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc., got a new liver recently and I am disgusted about it.
I obviously don’t know the full details because Apple and Jobs are keeping a tight lid on them but my problem with the whole situation is that he was able to get to the top of a donor list quicker than many, many people who have most likely waited longer for a liver.
By most likely putting himself on numerous donor lists throughout the country Jobs was able to give himself the highest percentage of finding a liver which the average person can’t do.
“To get on a transplant center's list, a prospective patient must go there, be evaluated by the staff and have tests to confirm medical need. If accepted, the patient must be able to get to that center within seven or eight hours if an organ becomes available. That means renting or buying a place nearby or being able to afford a private jet, or $3,000 to $5,000 for a chartered plane, to fly in on short notice,” the Associated Press reported last week.
What kind of average person has the kind of money to accomplish that?
That’s not illegal or anything, yet, but I think it’s unethical.
I’d like to think most people, if faced with getting a new liver themselves as a grown adult or having a child get the same liver, would choose the latter.
I know talk is cheap but I really believe that.
There are probably numerous children with the same exact disease who have been waiting on one list in their local town or county for a very long time and just because Jobs has a ridiculous amount of money and power he’s able to sprint past all of them so he, at 54 years old, can keep on keeping on.
I know he didn’t necessarily get a liver that would have gone to a child but either way he cheated the system.
I think the whole donor system should be revamped so this can’t happen anymore.
Here’s what I think it should change to: the people with the most to live for, children in particular, should have priority over any adult.
In a statement issued by the hospital in Tennessee that performed the transplant they said Jobs was, “The sickest person on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available.”
That’s a bunch of garbage.
Who says that he was the “sickest” person? The doctors? What kind of term is that anyway, “sickest.”
I’d say a child with the same liver disease, even if it’s in the beginning or middle stages, has a lot more to live for than Jobs.
Jobs has lived a full-life. With the transplant he’ll add another 30 years or so to his life, which is all well and good. But what if that liver could have went to a four-year-old? They would have 80 years to live including at least the chance at a full-life.
I wish the donor system didn’t work like that and I’m tempted to write on the back of my driver’s license, since I’m a donor, that I demand my organs go to children if I’m in a car accident rather than wealthy billionaires past the halfway point in their lives. Too bad I can’t fit that much information on the back of the tiny thing.