New York State Campaign - The Living Organ Donor Support Act

Model Transplant Support Legislation

Live donor transplants should be easy to ask for and easy to give. But right now, many barriers stand in the way. Donors must pay thousands of dollars in lost wages and caretaker expenses, just to save someone else’s life. Patients who need a transplant receive little education or help with publicizing their search. Donor health is left unprotected.

The New York Living Organ Donor Support Act would help fix all these problems: by paying donor expenses, protecting donor health, and improving education of patients, their families, and the public. For an expected annual cost of $3 million dollars, experts say the bill would create $11.5M in taxpayer savings and lead to more than 100 transplants per year.

In addition, Waitlist Zero has lead a working group of New York institutions to develop a set of model proposals that would offer donors a year of free health insurance post-surgery, improve transparency for patients with kidney disease in choosing their doctors, and increase public awareness of donation. These proposals have broad support among the public, with polls finding that 84% of New Yorkers support paying organ donor lost wages, 96% support providing donors health insurance, and 90% think better education is needed. Trusted advocates for organ donation have endorsed the bill, including Mt. Sinai Hospital, NYU-Langone Medical Center, the Northeast Kidney Foundation, LiveOn NY and the Greater New York Hospital Association.

To support our work, please write to info@waitlistzero.org.

Covering Financial Costs

Covering financial costs of donation such as lost wages, travel, and childcare.

Currently, kidney donors are responsible for any lost wages, travel, and childcare expenses that stem from their surgery. That’s not fair! Many donors lose a month’s worth of wages or more because of their act of kindness. Average expenses total more than $4,000. No one generous enough to donate a kidney should have to pay money to save a life. Kidney donation saves the state money by decreasing Medicaid costs and increasing tax revenue from healthy workers. The states should reimburse donors for the costs of their donation.

Luckily, setting up a system of reimbursement should not be hard. The federally funded National Living Donor Assistance Center already exists to reimburse travel expenses for donors beneath a certain income threshold. It could easily handle the task of reimbursing lost wages and childcare expenses as well.

The Living Organ Donor Support Act calls for comprehensive reimbursement of donor expenses. Making our organ donors whole is not just the right thing to do: it will also ensure that patients have access to medical care regardless of their income. Right now, richer people donate at higher rates even though poorer people are more likely to need transplants. Failing to support donors hurts our most vulnerable citizens, and the LORDS Act would change that.