Health Care

Eric Boehm | From the October 2024 issue

An estimated 12 people die every day while waiting for a kidney transplant. At least some of those deaths are preventable, and monopoly government contractors shoulder most of the blame.

"Monopolies don't work and 
government-funded monopolies are even worse," says Jennifer Erickson, a former Obama White House staffer who now works as a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists.

On the new season of Reason's podcast Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Erickson explains how Congress' good intentions produced a flawed system that has resisted reform for decades. In the 1980s, when the development of immunosuppressant drugs made organ transplants more workable, Congress passed a law creating about 50 regional monopolies where organ procurement organizations (OPOs) would have the exclusive right to collect donated organs and match them with needy recipients. Overseeing the regional monopolies is a national contractor, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS).

Many of those OPOs........

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