4922095
story
Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday June 20, @07:16AM
from the need-it-to-live-hence-the-name dept.
evw writes
"The Wall Street Journal reports that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago (subscription required, alternative coverage is available based on the WSJ's report). He is on track to return to work at the end of June. 'William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. ... Having the procedure done in Tennessee makes sense because its list of patients waiting for transplants is shorter than in many other states.' There are no residency requirements for transplants."
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2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Informative)
I wish him well... my Dad was able to go to Oshkosh (AirVenture) with me 1 year after his surgery. A trip I will never forget.
Bill
Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to compare to 'normal' people, because someone like Steve Jobs would have had an team of the very best surgeons working on him, and generally the best medical care that money could buy..
This being Slashdot, that raises interesting questions. Steve's not rich because he was born into a banker family, in fact, he was adopted. He's rich because people bought his products.
So, is it bad if he uses that money to get the kind of treatment you and I can't afford?
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
"So, is it bad if he uses that money to get the kind of treatment you and I can't afford?"
Always an interesting question. I would say yes, it is a bad thing. Not for Steve of course, but for what it represents.
Steve Jobs has large wads of cash as that is what we give people who prove themselves to be great assets to the economic system. No doubt, Steve Jobs is exactly that, but should your value to the economic system be the primary factor behind the level of medical care you receive? I would say no. Steve Jobs has no more right to the best standard of care than does somebody who has been in the police force, or a teacher (for example) their entire lives. In fact, I would say that anybody who has lived a moral, decent life should receive the same level of medical care, and that should be the highest available at the time. The only people that I would say might not deserve this are serious/career criminals.
It is easy to get confused in this matter because we are talking about Steve Jobs, who seems a pretty smart and decent guy anyway. How about if we replace Steve with Ken Lay, should 'Kenny Boy' receive a much higher level of medical care than somebody who choose to be a librarian rather than a 'business tycoon'?
You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types ;o), but I come from a country where we have socialised medicine. It is certainly not perfect, but I don't believe that is a fault with the system, but a fault with the people running it.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Funny)
Any medical care that Ken Lay gets would have to be the very best since he's been dead for 3 years. But I get your point ;-)
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Funny)
Why "the very best"? It's not like any treatment he gets is going to kill him or anything.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Insightful)
If your country has socialized medicine; then I'm guessing that people go OUTSIDE the system (or even the country) to get the best care possible.
This Churchill quote seems appropriate right now: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Interesting)
This Churchill quote seems appropriate right now: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
How about this one from Geza Hofi: "In capitalism, people exploit people. In socialism, it's the other way around."
And no need to guess about going abroad: Hungarian politicians haven't seen a Hungarian hospital from the inside since WW2.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Informative)
Well to save you from guessing, I'll tell you how it is in the UK. The vast majority of people use the National Health Service all the time (what you call "socialized" medicine). Some people go outside the system (private) if they can afford it and they want a nice private room rather than a ward, or to get minor procedures done at a time to suit them, rather then wait. Or if they want unnecessary work such as plastic surgery done. But if you have something SERIOUS wrong, like you've had a heart attack, or you need a liver transplant. Then the NHS is the place to be. They have the specialists and the equipment needed to give you the best care, not the private hospitals.
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Re:yea (Score:4, Insightful)
Er, poor Americans run to Canada, rich Canadians run to America. Not saying that there's anything wrong with the Canadian system, it's just human nature to do the best you can when your health is on the line. And if you've got tons of cash to blow, the US has got great doctors for you.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Interesting)
Living in Canada (where are you located), I disagree. The system does not provide best care and there should be a legal way to get extra care above what they normally provide if you pay the money.
Think about this: if a public hospital allows a person to stay only for a few days after a surgery, why shouldn't a person with means be able to leave that place and go to a private hospital that does not depend on the public resources and stay there for any amount of time that it takes this person to recover fully or until he even simply feels like it as long as he pays? In Ontario this is generally illegal, however what would be the difference between that and simply hiring a bunch of nurses/doctors to take care of you personally in your house even (except that doing it would be so expensive that only the richest people, someone exactly like Jobs could afford it?)
How is it even legal to prevent a professional to provide his/her services for the best payment if he wants that extra money? I am a software developer working on contracts, generally speaking I always search for the best deal I can get. Why should a doctor be denied opportunity to get the most money his abilities would allow him?
So the only argument against a fully private system would be this: if the government subsidizes education of some doctors, then it could demand that those, who were subsidized give back at least some of their time to the public system (say 30% minimum of their time would go to public system) Of-course there is a larger problem with government subsidizing any education system - it drives the education costs up, because universities know that government is there to provide loans, so whatever the costs of education are, anyone can just get this 'mortgage' to pay for it, so there is no incentive to make education any cheaper.
If the government stayed away from subsidizing education, the prices for it would go down and more people would be able to afford it in the first place. More doctors would graduate and that would drive their prices down so even a private health system could be affordable.
You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types
- and I am not, as you can probably guess, I believe on economy my position is logical and yours is not. You would have a system that would be regulated, taxed and subsidized and would eventually collapse under its own bureaucratic cost.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. This is pretty much the same as saying that when the goverment wouldn't subsidise car manufacturers, everyone could afford a Porsche.
A private education system, same as a private healthcare system, will charge for the services whatever the market can bear. That means for healthcare that the doctors will charge real shitloads of money. Just because they can - if people are seriously ill, they'll pay any cost to get healthy again. Those, who cannot afford to pay that huge sums of money would receive no healthcare - thre is no reason doctors would waste their time for the poor when they can use the time to treat wealthy patients. Everyone else would have to pray to their personal deity or to resort to traditional medicine (which is also pretty costly these days since there aren't that many places anymore where you can harvest herbs).
Same would happen to education.
Nope, your position is illogical because it is based on beliefs. In other words, economy is a religion for you.
What I describe are just facts. We have already had fully private education and fully private medicine. There is a good reason why 20th century has changed that.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Interesting)
How does that work? (Bear in mind, I work in the healthcare insurance industry, so I know of what I speak). What amazes me is that people somehow think their insurance is this magical creature that makes money and pays these excesses/is a charity covering that cost.
That money is still coming out of you, you're just put on an indirect payment plan!
Imagine a more direct method of the same: "Well, your bill is $40. Or you can pay me $40/month for the next four months."
Some would have you believe that the latter is a good deal, because it means, in theory, if you're not denied coverage, rescinded for some real or implied reason, etc, etc, that when you go to the emergency room for a couple of days and come home with a bill equal to many people's annual salary, you reap the benefits of insurance, forgetting that without the implied acceptance of such high rates, your hospital stay wouldn't have cost anywhere near as much in the first place.
I used to work for a corporate law firm in Australia. They charged up to $600/hr for legal work, more when they went into court. Companies happily paid this, because legal expenses are tax deductible. The company knows they get to write it off, so the law firms can make a mint. When was the last time you heard of a law firm going bankrupt?
Doctors are being advised to invest in MRI, LASIK. Leaving aside the interesting side effect that doctors who own or own shares in an MRI machine/practice are up to 10% more likely to refer you for an MRI, this is a fantastic investment, because of people like you and me on insurance. You can pay $1, 1.5M for an MRI machine, and see your investment paid off within a year, quite easily, and then anything beyond that is a nice skim of upwards of $500,000 a year in profit. Why? Because we, the working stiff, are paying upwards of $1,800 for an hours worth of diagnostic procedure (and again, remember, "insurance" isn't paying it. You are. Insurance is just giving you a nice payment plan).
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't be immoral for me to accept the work, but it would be immoral of me to demand access to the liver so that I could use that during my 'overtime'
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
The true measure of a society is not how they treat the most valued, but how they treat the most despised.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Interesting)
But when such a society treats the most despised better than they treat the most valued, what does that say about how they understand value? There are millions of disenfranchised working poor who cannot get medical treatment that prisoners in jail get simply by being incarcerated. If you can advance the constitutional rights of criminals, why is it that such arguments are not made for those who are financially imprisoned?
There is no conundrum here, you just aren't following things through to their logical conclusion.
The fact of the matter is that we value the working poor less than those who are imprisoned for their crimes.
The attitude seems to be that if you're imprisoned you have no choice in the matter. You cannot care for yourself. You cannot get your own healtchare. And someone has to take care of you. We feel obligated to those we've robbed of their ability to take care of themselves.
But if you're out of prison, and just plain poor, it's your own damn fault. You need to get a better job or invent something cool so you earn enough money to pay for your own healthcare. And if you can't manage that? Well, that's nobody's fault but your own...
The imprisoned might very well be valuable members of society as soon as we let them. The poor, obviously, aren't valuable members of society because they wouldn't be poor if they were.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, first of all, I'm neither a doctor nor an economist. So you're going to have to take most of what I say with a grain of salt.
Second, I don't know how they do it, but plenty of nations manage national healthcare without falling apart. Take a look at Canada for an example, or France. They both managed to pull it off somehow. I'd assume we can do something similar...
I'm also not certain that a shortage of doctors would be any worse than what we have now. What we have now is a very uneven system in which millions of people go without any healthcare because they cannot afford it. If we instead had a system in which millions of people went without any healthcare because there weren't enough doctors I'd say we're at about the same point, not worse-off.
Supply and demand generally seems to take care of itself... Yes, there are various shortages here and there, but you don't see the world falling apart because there's some terrible dearth of postal workers. There's plenty of people flipping burgers... Plenty of people going to school for years only to get crap jobs in IT... I'm not convinced that all our doctors would suddenly disappear just because they didn't get paid as much.
But how's this for a solution: Free medical school.
Let anyone who passes the entrance exams go through medical school for free. Upon graduation they have to work for the state, at state-set prices/pay, for several years. Then they can go into practice for themselves.
Now you've got universal healthcare provided by the folks who're working off their tuition. And you've got plenty of doctors flooding the market because tuition is no longer a barrier to entry, only intelligence/capability. And after they've paid off their tuition they can still go into private practice and earn the big paychecks that they want - assuming they're providing something better than the universal healthcare that everyone can get for free.
Or you could do something similar with the state medical board certifications. You want to be certified to practice medicine in the state, you have to work for the state for a few years. Again you get rid of one of the barriers to entry... Again you retain the ability for doctors to make those fat paychecks you think are so important... And again you come up with free universal healthcare for the rest of us.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just medical care that gets this treatment, or do you extend this to all goods and services?
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
What's being suggested is all the same HEALTH benefits. The answer is of course that people "do" for a mixture of reasons possibly including getting paid and enjoying it. You don't need to bribe people with their health to get them to "do".
Conversely, punishing the poor with third rate or none existent healthcare, as you already do, has done nothing whatsoever to solve the problem you highlight, has it? Look at this list of recent unemployment rates. America is mid table amongst other countries that have "socialized" healthcare.
No, it doesn't need any explaining at all. You cast some people are vermin that don't deserve healthcare. Your analogy contains no possibility of any such vermin proving themselves worthy of healthcare. Your analogy casts people as vermin from birth to death, with no possibility of change. Or possibly, just possibly, your analogy that you thought unquestionable was a little silly.
That rather reveals that you don't know enough about "socialized" medicine to be passing any comment at all. Most countries that have "socialized" medicine don't make private medicine illegal.
Question: Why aren't you campaigning to get rid of the "socialized" fire service, "socialized" highways, and "socialized" police services you already have. Surely according to your line of thinking they will never work.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Interesting)
Question: Why aren't you campaigning to get rid of the "socialized" fire service, "socialized" highways, and "socialized" police services you already have. Surely according to your line of thinking they will never work.
It's working well in Michigan...
Fire Service ... layoffs/closures ... disrepair/natural reclamation ... layoffs ... layoffs/closures ... sporadic shutdowns
Highways/Roads
Police
Education
Government
Well, at least they recognize that something is wrong, they just can't seem to figure out what it is.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Insightful)
This is actually an interesting question and while I don't know that I have a specific answer, if you ever have to deal with any of these three systems directly you know what a mess they are. Police and road work are easy to pick on.
Few people with a brain think, "Wow, those boys in blue do nothing but protect the innocent and save lives. They always tell the truth and never pull anyone over just to increase state revenue." And I've never been anywhere in the USA where people say, "Man, the road work here is done in such a well thought out manner and they're not constantly ripping things up over and over again and they're always on schedule." Corruption and greased palms go hand in hand with everything the government pays for--this includes the FEW things I think the government ought to pay for. So, even for someone like me (who is very much opposed to socializing most things), you're right that there are some things meet a certain threshold where they're good that the government pays for them.
Those aside though, I want to point out something that 2.5 of those have that most people proposing socialized medicine advocates generally don't advocate: local control. I don't have federal police officers or federal firemen and although there are SOME (this is the 2.5 deal) federal highways, a majority of the roads are handled by the state and county, not by the federal government. This gives locals more control and, in theory, leads to higher accountability to the people directly.
I would be much more willing to consider some kind of socialized medicine IF it was at a state level with no federal strings attached.
However, socializing medicine is a government "solution" to a government "problem" and the problem of corrupt medical and pharmaceutical companies. It's a way to get the government to pay for the excessive costs and fees being pushed out by the medical industry in general rather than dealing with the problem of what is, more or less, a price fixed quasi-monopoly. So now you have the government paying into these companies and with that kind of money they buy all the government they need to keep their cartel going. At least if it's localized there's a competitive market of sorts among the states rather than a big fat stupid bloated contract from the feds.
Health care in this country is broken and I have to say, it wasn't always broken. When my grandfather was born a stay in the hospital (and I have the bill) for his mother including all the delivery and care and everything came to a wooping $28. While inflation accounts for some of the disparity in costs, think of how much a week's stay would cost now without insurance. Why has the cost risen so much?
That's the real problem with healthcare. Instead of just saying, "No one can afford it, the government needs to pay for it..." no one seems to be asking, "Why can't people afford it?" The generations before my parents, my grandparents and up managed to be healthy and afford their doctors on the wages of working men and women. What's changed?
The answer is not as simply "do we socialize or not socialize?"
And it's not just the medical industry either. It's the American lifestyle. Healthcare is about surgery and pills and not about taking care of yourself. All one has to do is look at the rise of obesity here. My mom was on what seemed like 100 medications for multiple sclerosis for years. She was living in a state of just... numbness. More or less, one day she had an epiphany of sorts and changed her diet, started exercising regularly, lost 100ish pounds over the course of 16 months and now is on no meds, has stable blood pressure and is doing better than she's done in her entire life.
Should me or my neighbors have been forced to pay for someone like my mom
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Money is pissed away by DOD like you wouldn't believe. I shudder sometimes at the huge amounts of money I see foolishly wasted...with no repercussions to the people who made the bad decisions. In fact often the most ineffective managers get the most promotions and awards.
I've seen the same kind of inefficiency, waste, and idiotic management... in large corporations. What you're talking about is not a feature of public vs. private sector, it's a feature of large vs. small. The exact same kind of bureaucracy, inefficiency, etc. infects any organization once is surpasses a certain size.
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It is astounding .... (Score:4, Insightful)
... to see how many people can't grasp the concept of human rights.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:4, Insightful)
So if any of these [dekalbmugs.com] people or these people [gwinnettmugs.com] need a liver transplant, they should be front and center in line to get a brand new liver, well ahead of a supportive member of society that regularly pays his contribution to society?
Strawman. No one is suggesting elevating them to a higher status and pushing them to the front. What we're saying is that being arrested for shoplifting, DUI, or driving on a suspended license should not get you kicked from the "first come, first served, weighted for urgency" organ transplant list.
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Re:2 Months is very fast (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly! Add to that the fact that the surgeons simply needed to rotate Steve by 90 degrees to have all his internal organs shift to 'landscape mode' for easy access and I am sure the surgery was a breeze.
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Who the hell cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't we supposed to care about the technical side of things and his ideas, but by no means about his private life?
Proof / Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did the information about a transplant come from? I hope the source was verified, and re-verified, and then re-verified again. Remember when CNN posted that Jobs had had a heart attack, but it simply turned out to be "citizen journalism" gone horribly, horribly wrong? Gotta be careful with this crap.
Either way, all the best to The Steve.
Re:Proof / Evidence (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Proof / Evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why a liver transplant? (Score:4, Interesting)
This comes as quite a surprise. (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, usually you can't upgrade the components in Apple stuff very easily.
In all seriousness, though, I wish him well. Sounds like an unpleasant ordeal.
Subscription Required (Score:5, Funny)
When I read the summary, it came across as having a transplant requires a subscription.
Questionable standards for reporting by WSJ (Score:5, Interesting)
Immediately after the article was posted on their site, I wrote the writers and editors the following email:
Date: Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 01:23
Subject: Questionable standards for reporting by Wall Street Journal journalists Kane, Lublin, and Meckler
To: Yukari Iwatani Kane , "Joann S. Lublin" , Laura Meckler
Cc: "Robert J. Thomson" , New York Times News Department
Dear Journalists of The Wall Street Journal,
The two articles referred to below, published June 20, 2009 on the website of The Wall Street Journal, state controversially without attribution that Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs received a liver transplant in Tennessee approximately two months ago:
Reported June 20, 2009 by Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin, "Jobs Had Liver Transplant",
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124546193182433491.html [wsj.com]
Reported June 20, 2009 by Laura Meckler, "Jobs's Transplant Highlights Differing Wait Times",
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124546226305633529.html [wsj.com]
As journalists you are expected to seek reliable sources and to accompany reports of controversial facts with attribution. However, as Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin state in the first article, "The specifics of Mr. Jobs's surgery couldn't be established." They further state explicit lack of verification of Job's putative surgery by spokespeople for each of the three hospitals in Tennessee designated as liver-transplant centers.
As of ten minutes ago I could find only the following two other online articles reporting on this topic. As their sources these articles cite only The Wall Street Journal, and at that as a secondary source:
Reported June 19, 2009 by MG Siegler, "Not Only Was Steve Jobs Sick. He Had A Liver Transplant",
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/not-only-was-steve-jobs-sick-he-had-a-liver-transplant/ [techcrunch.com]
Reported June 19, 2009 by Peter Kavka, "Report: Steve Jobs Is Recovering From Liver Transplant, Still Coming Back to Apple",
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090619/report-steve-jobs-is-recovering-from-liver-transplant-still-coming-back-to-apple/ [allthingsd.com]
Do you have primary sources of this information? Have you checked and cross checked this information? If you have evidence, have you validated its authenticity? Do you have corroboration?
If so, please elaborate in your articles.
Re:Questionable standards for reporting by WSJ (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the Washington Post that brought Nixon down, not the Wall Street Journal.
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Big news (Score:4, Insightful)
Zombie Steve Jobs has system upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs, visionary leader of Apple Computer, has died -- and come back, better and stronger [today.com].
"They don't call it the Jesus Phone for nothing," Jobs laughed with reporters, before eating their tasty, tasty brains.
Jobs' new cyborg arsenal includes wifi, 3G, laser cannons, a flame thrower and a can opener, all running on Mac OS X Robosteve. Bundled applications include an enhanced hypnotic force field based on the one he uses at MacWorld keynotes. "I can't wait to try it on Bill," he said.
Disney, in which Jobs is the single largest shareholder, remained unaffected. "Steve's just working with the way we do things here," said the disembodied computer-hosted soul of Walt Disney, who was decanted to a computer in 1966 to avoid being declared legally dead, so that copyright in his works would never, ever run out.
refurbished (Score:4, Funny)
Speaking as a doctor (Score:5, Informative)
Organ transplants are, with a few exceptions, usually contraindicated in cancer patients - especially when the cause of the failure of the organ is metastasis. But I guess if you're Steve Jobs, money truly CAN buy anything. The rest of us mortals however would be allowed to die quicker.
The Timing of Steve Jobsâ(TM)s Liver Transpla (Score:5, Informative)
Process of getting a liver transplant (Score:5, Interesting)
First, you need to have good medical care and good insurance. If your doctor has been carefully monitoring your liver with CT scans every six months because he realizes you're at risk (perhaps because you have Hep B), you will have a good chance at early detection of liver cancer. If you have no such proactive care, good luck!
Next, your doctor has to present you the option, you have to recognize its urgency, and you have to ask for the transplant, aggressively. If your doctor says, "This is not yet urgent", or "We can wait and monitor this", or if you say, "Can we just wait and see?", it might be too late by the time you recognize the danger (much like climate change and peak oil). That's because...
It takes 6 months to process a liver transplant application, then months to years to actually receive the transplant.
The application process has two parts: medical evaluation and financial means. The medical evaluation is a comprehensive evaluation to determine that you're a good candidate for transplant, that the cancer has not spread beyond the liver, and that you're psychologically fit for the transplant. The financial means evaluation... well, if you don't have the financial means, you do NOT get listed on the transplant list. Period. The only way to get a liver transplant without financial means is if you're an emergency case with sudden liver failure. Oh, you also need to have a designated caregiver who commits to taking time off work to take care if you, if/when necessary.
Once the application process starts, it can take 5 months to actually get on the transplant list. If the winter holidays occur fall in this time period, make that 6 months. If they accidentally list you on the non-cancer waiting list (with lower priority than the cancer waiting list), it might be another month (total 7 months) by the time somebody catches this mistake and it gets corrected. Most likely it will be YOU who catches the mistake, because nobody else is paying attention. If YOU fail to catch this error, the patient may be on the wrong (lower priority) waiting list indefinitely.
Once you're listed, it could take weeks to years to get the transplant. For non-cancer patients, the priority is determined strictly by a function of three blood test results: bilirubin, creatinine, and INR. As these levels go up, you develop ascites (fluid in abdomen), encephalopathy (cloudy mind), and then it gets worse. The problem is, you typically lose weight as you get sicker, and as you lose weight, the creatinine level goes DOWN, so your priority gets lower, initially! If you're lucky enough to be in Oregon or Florida, with no motorcycle helmet laws, you might get your transplant in a few months. If you're in Southern California or New York, you might be waiting a year or longer, progress to extreme illness and hospitalization, and be on the verge of death before getting the transplant. These are the patients who take 6 months to recover from the transplant. Often it takes days to weeks for the transplanted liver to start functioning. These patient have been IV fed for so long that the digestive tract is initially dysfunctional. They have to start with limited plain-cracker diets. Because their gut microbes have been ravaged, their gastric emissions are horrendous foul smelling.
If you're a liver cancer patient (like Jobs) the good thing is, you'll probably get your transplant sooner than the non-cancer patients, because liver cancer transplant priority goes up strictly by time on waiting list. "Sooner" is relative to when you got listed. If you trusted your Kaiser doctor and didn't sense any urgency, you probably didn't apply for the transplant until it was almost too late (there are limits are tumor size for transplant). If you are well-informed and proactively asked for a transplant application, you might get your transplant before you start to feel any symptoms of a dysfunctional liver. This is probably wha
Re:How much (Score:5, Funny)
theres was probably a line of apple fanboys queuing to give their livers to steve
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Re:How much (Score:5, Funny)
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to give your focus to my newest creation - the iLiver. The iLiver can work with our other iProducts, such as the iFood or iDrink..."
"Mr Jobs, I heard that it only handles DRM-content...I enjoy buying my food and drink at this bar down the road..."
"Only DRM-enabled goods purchased at the Apple Store can be accepted by the iLiver. But this is not a problem, with the Apple Store now hosting thousands of digestible products available to buy."
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Re:How much (Score:5, Funny)
He's just practicing that ol' "Buy American!" bit instead of running off to China like the rest of the rich and abusive.
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Re:How much (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA, Tennessee has a shorter wait time than most states: 48 days, instead of 306 nationally. That would be my guess as to why Tennessee.
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Re:How much (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:can Americans tell me.. (Score:4, Informative)
No, most hospitals are required by state law to treat folks without insurance for emergency care. So, by the point you are actually dying you'll get treatment. And, by that point it's only palliative.
But, hey, at least the US doesn't have socialist health care! Those socialist fire fighters do such a terrible job putting out our houses when they're on fire, and don't get me started on those socialist training camps called public (US sense) schools.
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Re:can Americans tell me.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me an HMO that doesn't ration health care.
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Re:What about this Stem Cell Stuff??? (Score:4, Insightful)
And no matter how much money you have, you can't just "buy" a new medical technology in a matter of a few months.
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Re:nice to see (Score:4, Funny)
I'll drink to that!
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