The blackest of kidney black markets

Can some black markets be blacker than others? Two longtime observers of black markets for kidney transplants nominate some.

Ethan Gutmann writes chillingly of The Xinjiang Procedure: Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

"Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart. 

"With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance. 

"Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work. "

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And Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes of The Rosenbaum Kidney Trafficking Gang, and of kidney black markets more broadly (as well as of her difficulties in getting others to see these things as she sees them).

"Some of the victims of US organs trafficking are bonded servants from Syria and Jordan brought into the US to provide kidneys to their patron royal families from the Gulf States. The Cleveland Clinic has a transplant wing that for many years has catered to these so-called “transplant tourists.” UCLA had its heyday with wealthy Japanese Yakuza crime “family members” who were given priority for liver transplants from the UNOS waiting list, livers that technically belonged to US citizens.

"So, Rosenbaum’s network, though extensive, represents only one of many forms of transplant trafficking into and out of the United States. Transplant trafficking is a public secret within the transplant profession, something that everyone knows about but which within the corporatist culture of the transplant profession — as secretive as the Vatican — is never discussed.
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"Caught in the dragnet Rosenbaum admitted that he charged a lot to set up these illegal transplants in some of the best hospitals on the east coast, including Mount Sinai in NYC , Albert Einstein in Philadelphia, and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
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"Nobody cared about, or even believed in, human trafficking for organs. I went to the media, to CBS, to 60 Minutes and then to 48 Hours which did send an investigative reporter, Avi Cohan, to meet me in Israel where we spoke to patients who had had “undercover” transplants at hospitals in NYC Philadelphia, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles. CBS decided not to do the exposé. I was stumped. No one wanted to accuse surgeons, or prevent a suffering patient from getting a transplant, even with an illegally procured kidney from a displaced person from abroad. The Israeli origins of the trafficking network did not help either. It smacked of bias, blood libel, or worse. “Don’t Indians and Pakistanis broker more kidneys than Israelis”, I was asked? Why pick on Israel?
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"What I imagine is that the complicit surgeons loved the Rosenbaum option because they didn’t have to go through UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which until 2007, had nothing to do with living donors, related or unrelated. Hospital administrators loved it because foreign patients paid cash so there was no waiting for Medicare or insurance premiums. And there was minimal responsibility for the aftercare of the recipients or their kidney providers. Both were speedily returned to their respective communities and countries. Should they ever get caught red-handed, surgeons can cite patient confidentiality (their privacy oath), the hospitals could pretend they had been duped, the transplant coordinators could say that they followed the transplant protocols for living donors, but they are not, after all, detectives. Everybody wins. Lives were ‘saved’, transplant surgeons got to do what they do best, poor people got a ‘bonus’ for being charitable with their ‘spare’ kidneys, and everybody was happy.
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"Meanwhile, complicit transplant doctors collude and protect each other, while the best ones tried to fix the problem from inside the profession without the help of the DOJ or the courts getting involved. Bioethicists argue endlessly about the “ethics” of what is in fact a crime and a medical human rights abuse. Economists and moral philosophers launch arguments based on rational choice theory for regulation rather than prosecution, as if prosecutions were going on every day. In fact, as the Rosenbaum history shows so well, human trafficking for organs is a protected crime. It is protected by the charisma and awe-inspiring ‘ miracle’ of transplant. The Rosenbaum guilty plea is the first prosecution in the United States for organs trafficking. On February 2nd Rosenbaum could be sentenced to five to 12 years in prison and a fine for illegally brokering organs in New Jersey. But the larger and deeper story of his international kidney dealings, his hired traffickers, kidney hunters, ‘enforcers’, money laundering operations, false charity organizations, Medicare fraud is yet to be told. And in the meantime, “life saving” for some at the cost of diminishing the lives of others ,the invisible kidney sellers of Chernobyl, Kiev, Nazareth, or the Negev desert, will continue undeterred.