Foreigners Get Priority on New Kidneys, Study Says

Foreign citizens sometimes get jumped ahead near the front of the line for kidney transplants at U.S. hospitals, even though nearly 10,000 Americans are on waiting lists, according to a study released today.

The report by the Health and Human Services Department said about 300 foreign citizens received transplanted kidneys last year, or 5.2% of all the kidneys transplanted from cadavers. An additional 200 to 250 kidneys were shipped overseas for foreign transplant operations.

Foreigners coming to the United States for a transplant tended to get their kidneys much more quickly than U.S. Medicare recipients, the inspector general’s report said.

No Official Policy

The report said investigators found no formal preference for foreign transplant patients among the hospitals studied, but it also found no stated policy in any of the institutions favoring U.S. citizens.

Without such a policy, the study said, foreigners tended to get quicker service because fewer of them had received medical treatment that would sensitize their bodies to foreign tissue.

At the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., the study said, the difference meant that the typical foreign citizen waited 16 weeks for a kidney transplant, while the typical Medicare recipient waited 41 weeks.

The study said medical experts justified the difference by noting the foreigners could accept more questionable tissue matches because they were not sensitized.

But the report said the net effect was to lessen the number of kidneys available to Americans who need them.

“With close to 10,000 people awaiting kidney transplantation in the United States, it is difficult to understand why nearly all of the 300 or so cadaver kidneys being transplanted into foreign nationals could not be provided to U.S. residents,” the report said.