The political economy of organ transplantation in the U.S.

Ricky Vohra has an interesting post called $’s and Kidneys in which he notices that surgeons may have a financial interest in opposing a monetary market for kidneys, and provides some interesting background links.

The following paper discusses the roles and relationships of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN), the Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), as determined by the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 and its subsequent interpretations. Its focus is the debate over the different waiting times to receive a deceased donor organ in different regions of the country, resulting from the regional (as opposed to national) allocation of organs, based on how many deceased donors are in each region (and not on how many patients):

THE PUBLIC ADMINSTRATION OF ORGAN ALLOCATION: MAINTAINING THE PUBLIC – PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP  by Stosberg and Gimbel
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And here's  a news story about Tampa General Hospital's active transplant programs. It details some of the revenues:

"The revenues a transplant program can generate are also significant. For example, the average estimated hospital admission fee nationwide for a heart transplant patient in 2011 was $634,300, according to the United Network of Organ Sharing. The nonprofit network helps the federal government manage the nation’s organ transplant system.
The average hospital admission fee for a single lung transplant in 2011 was $302,900, the network estimates. Other average estimates from the network: A liver transplant was $316,900; a pancreas was $108,900; and a kidney transplant was $91,200."