Reply #114: Transplant rationing is not about money.

[endarkenment]

And as for head in the sand, that would be yours with your OP and obtuse defense of same.

As essentially everyone else in this thread has repeatedly pointed out, you are conflating cost rationing and organ supply rationing and claiming that they are both the same thing. Organ supply rationing exists independent of health care delivery costs, for all practical and ethical purposes. All ethical health care systems have to manage the limited supply of organ donors and establish allocation systems and qualification criteria to make access fair. It really doesn't matter if we are discussing our crappy privatized healthcare system that delivers vastly expensive per capita service with mediocre results, or any of the excellent universal health care systems that deliver superior results at much lower per capita cost than ours, they all have to ration organ donations in a similar fashion. This issue is not relevant to the debate over health care reform - it won't change much. it is pretty much the same everywhere.

Chew on this: we have had universal health care for kidney transplants for decades. Nobody seems to be horrified by that system or claiming that !EGADS! kidneys are not available on demand to all comers.