This is Sp….bwahahahah, and the Curious Case of the Misappropriated Kidney, aka the Net Benefit Policy

The film club saw 300 yesterday. As Norm MacDonald famously said about Interview with the Vampire, this movie was “not gay enough”. The film is yet another Frank Miller graphic novel gorgeously adapted to the screen, albeit with a good deal of revisionist history thrown in for good measure. The movie is all bombastic speeches, fierce battle scenes, sex that borders on the violent, and fiercely erect nipples (on the women) and ripped abs (on the men). The film (and I would guess, the graphic novel upon which it is based), whitewash the issue of Spartan homosexuality; in fact, the only overt reference to Greek love in the movie is an off-handed reference to the Athenians as “boy lovers”. Oddly enough, none of Xerxes‘ army appeared at all, well, Persian, and the man himself looks and sounds like a pan-sexual reject from a failed Stargate sequel. I’d love to see the outtakes from this one. I can only imagine how many times Gerard Butler, Rodrigo Santoro and everyone around them had to stifle laughter at how unintentionally funny or simply over-the-top some of the lines in this movie were. I’m reminded of Harrison Ford’s comment on George Lucas’ Star Wars scripts, “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it”.

I was trying to think of a witty seque to the next topic, but I think I would doing the subject a disservice by doing so. I’m referring to this article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal (sorry, but the full text is only available to online subscribers) that talks about new kidney transplant guidelines being developed by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the non-profit body that contracts with the Federal Government to develop organ transplantation guidelines. These new guidelines will allocate organs by virtue of the concept of “net benefit”, or who would benefit the most from a transplanted organ, rather than by length of time on the waiting list. The rationale is logically sound, if a little ethically disturbing. A 70 year-old patient at the top of the list could be leapfrogged by a 30-year old, simply because the younger patient would wring more use from the transplanted organ before dying. I claim to be neither a public policy expert nor a bioethicist, but this smacks of utilitarianism at its ugliest. The article goes on to say that the guidelines for hearts, lungs and livers have already been overhauled. I know there are a lot of factors which go into the algorithm used to rank candidates, but it boggles my mind that a 30 year-old with a cirrhotic liver and Hep C contracted during years of unprotected sex and/or drug and alcohol abuse might have a higher place in line than a 60 year-old who had the misfortune to be born with a congenital condition, simply because the 30 year-old patient is likely to live longer than his older counterpart. I haven’t read the policies in depth, but for shits & giggles I searched them for the words sex, promiscuous, and drug. The only hit for sex referred to gender, promiscuous wasn’t found, and the only instance of the word drug referred to the drug use history of the donor. Now, that doesn’t mean that such information isn’t collected, but I have to wonder if it’s used as a basis in ranking candidates. And should it? Should we be making moral judgments about the suitability of a candidate based on past bad life decisions. I don’t know, but I certainly hope I don’t need an organ transplant later in life. The hopeless cynic in me thinks this will result in the maturation of the black market for organs, and will become yet another differentiator between the haves and the have-nots in this country. The rich and old will buy illegally appropriated, or perhaps even cloned, organs, while the poor will simply die.

UnQ