
Addressing the Organ Donor Crisis
Summary
The organ-donation crisis is one of the most persistent, expensive, and yet solvable public-health challenges of our time. As of January 2020, nearly 115,000 Americans were waitlisted for an organ transplant. The vast majority have kidney failure, which, as one of the rare conditions qualifying patients for Medicare, imposes billions of dollars of costs on taxpayers. In 2016 alone, taxpayers spent an alarming $113 billion on kidney disease — more than the entire budgets of the National Institutes of Health ($39 billion), the Department of Homeland Security ($44 billion), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, $21.5 billion) combined. The clear solution is to shorten the organ waiting list. For every Medicare patient who receives a kidney transplant, taxpayers save $250,000 in avoided dialysis costs. This proposal presents a discrete set of actions for the federal government to take to quickly and decisively to address the organ-donation crisis.
Truly open science requires that the public is not only able to access the products of research, but the knowledge embedded within.
Over the last year we’ve devoted considerable effort to understanding wildfire in the context of U.S. federal policy. Here’s what we learned.
Movement, whether through structured exercise or general physical activity in everyday life, has a major impact on the health of individuals and as a result, on the health of societies.
To bring participatory science into the mainstream, there will need to be creative policy solutions for incentive mechanisms, standards, funding streams, training ecosystems, assessment mechanisms, and organizational capacity.