A federal judge ordered that Sarah Murnaghan, a ten-year-old waiting on a lung transplant, be allowed on the adult transplant waiting-list. Postrel reflects on the case:
Murnaghan’s family is correct that the 12-year-old cutoff doesn’t reflect medical considerations and, as a result, puts children like Sarah at an arguably unfair disadvantage. But any weighing of lives will seem unfair to the losers. The current system generally favors people in dire straits over healthier patients, for instance. It gives patients points for waiting a long time and, as a result, favors older, sicker patients over younger, healthier ones. That reflects one politically determined idea of fairness. But it would be equally fair– or equally unfair — to favor healthier patients who might live longer with the precious organ.
Aaron Carroll also ponders these hard choices:
The reason that kids under 12 aren’t on the list is there’s little known about how adult lungs will work in kids. If a kids’ set of lungs became available (again – tragedy in and of itself), then they’d transplant them. But that is even more rare than a pair of adult lungs becoming available (again – good thing). So an adult, or an adolescent, is prioritized, and kids under 12 have to wait for a pediatric donor.
Is this fair? Is this right? I don’t know. I know that dedicated, compassionate, ethical people set the policy.
