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.”
As usual, all criticism without references or an alternative solution. Oh, and a casual slur without proof.
Go back beneath your bridge
You could just read the text of the bill. What does this bill accomplish? It removes the $7 million limit on contract awards, and give the HRSA authority to give contracts out to whomever for whatever.
It also requires that the HRSA submit a GAO report, which you would think means oversight, but in reality it just means politicizing the decisions made by the HRSA, ensuring that fatter contracts go to the oligarchs that want more taxpayer money. Do you really think the MAGAs in Congress don’t expect to get their beaks wet? There’s a reason it has so much bipartisan support in Congress.
It also corrects the misspelling of “histocompatibility,” just in case you were concerned that the people making decisions were incompetent.
UNOS has actual problems, and there are systemic inequalities inherent in our OPTN. This bill addresses none of them. If they wanted to fix them, they could nationalize UNOS or regulated OPOs, or fund a national modern database with proper EDI formats. They could fund research for ethical reviews of bias in organ distribution. None of that is in this bill. All of the speeches and summaries include these targets as possibilities and goals for the new process, but none of it is actually included.
The bill isn’t named in the article, which makes tracking down the text to read it a bit challenging. Will edit this comment later as I garner info.
Bill name: Securing the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network Act
Very brief summary.
Slightly longer aummary.
Allegedly the full text. I am not certain this is the final version, as opposed to the Senate version pre-reconciliation.
Based on the summaries, it for sure sounds like the contracts will simply go out for bid now, which should mean we can expect performance to degrade as companies compete for who can provide the worst service at the lowest pay grade.
Here’s the two page summary from the Senate Finance committee. It’s a pdf warning.
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/051723_securing_the_us_optn_act_summary.pdf
edited to unmask the link
Page not found. The above poster’s links work
Sorry, fixed it. Should work now.
Where’s the slur?