{"id":387113,"date":"2026-01-04T09:54:35","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T09:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/387113\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T09:54:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T09:54:35","slug":"rich-overseas-medical-tourists-rig-american-organ-transplant-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/387113\/","title":{"rendered":"Rich overseas medical tourists rig American organ transplant system"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 5,000 Americans died waiting for a kidney transplant in 2025. About a dozen a day. One of them was my first cousin Harrison Roberts.<\/p>\n

He was a rambunctious little boy. My earliest memories of Harry are him bouncing on my back at our grandmother\u2019s house on Thanksgiving. He was a hefty kid, so that took some indulgence on my part. But I\u2019m seven years older. I managed.<\/p>\n

His father Bill died when Harry was 15. Cancer. Then 20 years ago Harry got cancer himself \u2014 colon cancer, Stage 4. Doctors told him to go home, get his affairs in order and die.<\/p>\n

That wasn\u2019t acceptable to Harry, in his late 30s, with two young daughters. He fought, enduring intensive rounds of chemotherapy.<\/p>\n

Harry lived near Boston. Years would pass when we didn\u2019t speak. But I happened to be in town doing research around 2005 and visited him. We spent a few hours at Mass General while he underwent chemo. It wasn\u2019t a big deal, to me; saying goodbye seemed the decent thing to do.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realize that when you get cancer others tend to avoid you. Harry later told me he had friends who were reluctant to step inside his house. Like they\u2019d catch it or something. We were closer after that.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Harrison<\/p>\n

Harrison Roberts as a young boy at our grandmother\u2019s house in Cleveland in the early 1970s. He died of complications from kidney disease last August.<\/p>\n

Harry beat the cancer. But the chemo fried his kidneys, and they began to fail. For the past four years, he was on dialysis.<\/p>\n

Dialysis forces a person to sit in a chair three hours at a stretch, five days a week. Harry made calls, often to me. We talked about books, politics, family, everything. We spoke almost every day.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we ran out of things to say and would just silently sit for five or 10 minutes, the phone line open. I\u2019d hear ambient sounds from the hospital or dialysis center, which Harry once described as \u201ca cross between a medical clinic and a bus station.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

He needed a kidney. Harry had friends and relatives line up to offer one \u2014 at least six people. We were all rejected.<\/p>\n

Harry\u2019s theory was that Mass General didn\u2019t want to risk reducing its success rate by giving him a kidney. He\u2019d not only had cancer but a quadruple bypass. Dialysis erodes your heart. If he got a transplant and died, it would lower Mass General\u2019s batting average.<\/p>\n

Harry might have been onto something. A nurse pulled him aside and told him he was wasting his time there.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been urging him to go someplace else for years. There are other great hospitals. Barnes in St. Louis. The University of Chicago Medical Center. The University of Illinois Hospital has a well-regarded transplant program. I reached out to UIH. They were enthusiastic. Sure, if Harry gets to Chicago, they\u2019ll evaluate him.<\/p>\n

By then he\u2019d had another setback with his heart. Plus vein problems. He\u2019d lost part of his foot. Travel was out of the question. <\/p>\n

We watched his oldest daughter graduate college on Zoom last year; I stayed with him while his wife Yi attended the ceremony \u2014 two weeks driving him to dialysis, hanging out, talking. He taught me to play Go.<\/p>\n

None of this would have made print \u2014 not everything belongs in the newspaper. But on Dec. 16 The New York Times ran a front-page story, \u201cHospitals Cater to \u2018Transplant Tourists\u2019 as U.S. Patients Wait for Organs.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

At first glance I thought the story was about Americans going overseas to get organs while patients here languish \u2014 Harry and I had joked about buying a black-market kidney in Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n

But no, those were American hospitals doing the catering. The story was about rich foreigners coming to the United States and going to the top of the transplant list by dropping a few million bucks on American hospitals.<\/p>\n

And not obscure ones, either. The story starts with the wife of a Japanese hotel magnate coming to the University of Chicago Medical Center to get a heart. Shortly thereafter, her husband made a big donation to a charity run by the surgeon\u2019s wife. About 1,000 foreign patients a year get transplants in the United States, paying as much as $2 million to cut in line.<\/p>\n

U of C wouldn\u2019t answer questions about the practice, telling the Times it \u201csignificantly improved access to organ transplantation in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrison Roberts was my hero, though when I told him that, he replied, \u201cNobody\u2019s a hero for running out of a burning building.\u201d He was modest and smart, and faced death with great bravery and little self-pity.<\/p>\n

He never gave up, struggling to win a nightmarish game that turned out to be rigged against him. It isn\u2019t fair he died on the waiting list on Aug. 31 at age 58, while rich folks bought the medical version of a fast pass.<\/p>\n

I know, I know. Another system skewed to favor the wealthy. Stop the presses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 5,000 Americans died waiting for a kidney transplant in 2025. About a dozen a day. One…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":{"0":"post-387113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}