Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Lifesharers has shut down:

With a whimper rather than a bang (I just noticed it recently), the valiant, Quixotic attempt to introduce--via a private club--priority for deceased donation to those who were registered donors themselves, has ended.
(see my post from 2008: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 Lifesharers: organ donation as a club good rather than a public good

Here's the lifesharers final anouncment:

Monday, March 21, 2016

LifeSharers has shut down.

"If your durable power of attorney for healthcare mentions your agreement to donate your organs through LifeSharers, you should change it.

If you have told your family and/or your doctors that you want to donate your organs through LifeSharers, you should let them know that's no longer possible."
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It was an interesting but doomed attempt to do privately something very much like what has been done publicly in Israel -- here are my posts on priority donation in Israel.

Judd Kessler and I proposed a model which distinguished between the effective Israeli approach and the well-intentioned but inefficacious Lifesharers approach as follows. In Israel, those who register for donation gain priority for the already existing pool of deceased donors, while in Lifesharers the initial members only gain priority for each other. So, if there is even a small cost of joining, there is an equilibrium at which no one joins lifesharers, and indeed, unfortunately, it seems that Lifesharers never gained enough members to facilitate even a single transplant.

Contrast the difficulty of getting mutual donation going (with each death leading to only a very low probability of making a donation possible), with the easier task faced by the 19 Century Society for Mutual Autopsy 

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