Here’s a gory indicator of inequality in access to health care in the United States: People who lack health insurance are far more likely to donate organs than to receive them.
A recent study by the physicians Andrew A. Herring, Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein based on hospital data for 2003 finds that 16.9 percent of organ donors were uninsured, compared to 0.8 percent of transplant recipients.
Nancy Folbre, “Insuring Hearts (and Kidneys, Lungs and Livers), Economix, 17 August 2009.
There is a simple explanation for this finding: transplant recipients have better access than organ donors to public insurance. Transplant recipients are almost always in poor health, so more likely than organ donors to be to be eligible for Medicare (a government program for the elderly and disabled) or Medicaid (a government program for the poor).
A close reading of the Herring et al. study cited by Ms Folbre reveals that more than half of the transplant recipients had public insurance (44.2% Medicare and 9.0% Medicaid). In contrast, only 14.6% of donors had Medicare and another 2.6% had Medicaid. A reasonable conclusion is that healthy people are more likely than unhealthy people to be uninsured in the United States. This “indicator of inequality” is neither gory nor surprising. It would be gory if the reverse were true, i.e. if organ donors had better access than transplant recipients to government-funded health care.
Professor Folbre (1952-) is a “feminist economist” who teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
