Very quietly, Trump may have just saved 43,000 livesAmerican Thinker, Jul 13, 2019, Monica Showalter
It's been going on for years: patients waiting for years for a life-saving kidney donation, and sometimes dying as they waited in those long, long lines. Kidney patients are most prominent among those waiting in line, but that's only because those waiting for other kinds of organs die so quickly that they can't wait in any line at all.
Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke at Forbes points out a very little-reported story involving President Trump, who just days ago quietly signed an executive order that could save as many as 43,000 lives of the waiting kidney patients. His order involved several compassionate measures to make their lives easier, but perhaps the best one will involve increasing the supply of available kidneys by as much as 50% by 2030, which is the aim.
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The regulations that President Trump voted to get rid of, which Hanke says will help the most, are those that prohibited any possible payment for lost wages or child care costs, of those who donate organs to others. That's one thing that has made it so hard for the supply of kidneys and other organs to reach the people who need them. For a living donor, donating the kidney itself is not the problem — anyone who does that will live a perfectly normal life afterward while at the same time giving life itself to a second human being. Hanke notes that the actual supply is already there.
But it's a tough — and for some, impossible — thing to do when the law forbids even insurance companies from covering your legitimate expenses, which pile up fast and go high. And there aren't any tax breaks, either.
Hanke argues that that's long been something that needed changing. He also argues that even permitting actual payment to willing donors would ramp up the supply of kidneys even more and ensure enough for all who need these vital transplants.
More:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/very_quietly_trump_may_have_just_saved_43000_lives.html