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Steve Jobs Had a Liver Transplant Two Months Ago
evw writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago (subscription required, alternative coverage is available based on the WSJ's report). He is on track to return to work at the end of June. 'William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. ... Having the procedure done in Tennessee makes sense because its list of patients waiting for transplants is shorter than in many other states.' There are no residency requirements for transplants."
The Wall Street Journal articles have problems with lack of attribution and stated lack of verification of this info. If the story true (and I think it probably is), the authors of the articles need to elaborate.
Immediately after the article was posted on their site, I wrote the writers and editors the following email:
Date: Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 01:23
Subject: Questionable standards for reporting by Wall Street Journal journalists Kane, Lublin, and Meckler
To: Yukari Iwatani Kane , "Joann S. Lublin" , Laura Meckler
Cc: "Robert J. Thomson" , New York Times News Department
Dear Journalists of The Wall Street Journal,
The two articles referred to below, published June 20, 2009 on the website of The Wall Street Journal, state controversially without attribution that Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs received a liver transplant in Tennessee approximately two months ago:
Reported June 20, 2009 by Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin, "Jobs Had Liver Transplant",
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124546193182433491.html
Reported June 20, 2009 by Laura Meckler, "Jobs's Transplant Highlights Differing Wait Times",
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124546226305633529.html
As journalists you are expected to seek reliable sources and to accompany reports of controversial facts with attribution. However, as Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin state in the first article, "The specifics of Mr. Jobs's surgery couldn't be established." They further state explicit lack of verification of Job's putative surgery by spokespeople for each of the three hospitals in Tennessee designated as liver-transplant centers.
As of ten minutes ago I could find only the following two other online articles reporting on this topic. As their sources these articles cite only The Wall Street Journal, and at that as a secondary source:
Reported June 19, 2009 by MG Siegler, "Not Only Was Steve Jobs Sick. He Had A Liver Transplant",
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/not-only-was-steve-jobs-sick-he-had-a-liver-transplant/
Reported June 19, 2009 by Peter Kavka, "Report: Steve Jobs Is Recovering From Liver Transplant, Still Coming Back to Apple",
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090619/report-steve-jobs-is-recovering-from-liver-transplant-still-coming-back-to-apple/
Do you have primary sources of this information? Have you checked and cross checked this information? If you have evidence, have you validated its authenticity? Do you have corroboration?
If so, please elaborate in your articles.
Living in Canada (where are you located), I disagree. The system does not provide best care and there should be a legal way to get extra care above what they normally provide if you pay the money.
Think about this: if a public hospital allows a person to stay only for a few days after a surgery, why shouldn't a person with means be able to leave that place and go to a private hospital that does not depend on the public resources and stay there for any amount of time that it takes this person to recover fully or until he even simply feels like it as long as he pays? In Ontario this is generally illegal, however what would be the difference between that and simply hiring a bunch of nurses/doctors to take care of you personally in your house even (except that doing it would be so expensive that only the richest people, someone exactly like Jobs could afford it?)
How is it even legal to prevent a professional to provide his/her services for the best payment if he wants that extra money? I am a software developer working on contracts, generally speaking I always search for the best deal I can get. Why should a doctor be denied opportunity to get the most money his abilities would allow him?
So the only argument against a fully private system would be this: if the government subsidizes education of some doctors, then it could demand that those, who were subsidized give back at least some of their time to the public system (say 30% minimum of their time would go to public system) Of-course there is a larger problem with government subsidizing any education system - it drives the education costs up, because universities know that government is there to provide loans, so whatever the costs of education are, anyone can just get this 'mortgage' to pay for it, so there is no incentive to make education any cheaper.
If the government stayed away from subsidizing education, the prices for it would go down and more people would be able to afford it in the first place. More doctors would graduate and that would drive their prices down so even a private health system could be affordable.
You can probably guess I one of those evil socialist types
- and I am not, as you can probably guess, I believe on economy my position is logical and yours is not. You would have a system that would be regulated, taxed and subsidized and would eventually collapse under its own bureaucratic cost.
You can't handle the truth.
First, you need to have good medical care and good insurance. If your doctor has been carefully monitoring your liver with CT scans every six months because he realizes you're at risk (perhaps because you have Hep B), you will have a good chance at early detection of liver cancer. If you have no such proactive care, good luck!
Next, your doctor has to present you the option, you have to recognize its urgency, and you have to ask for the transplant, aggressively. If your doctor says, "This is not yet urgent", or "We can wait and monitor this", or if you say, "Can we just wait and see?", it might be too late by the time you recognize the danger (much like climate change and peak oil). That's because...
It takes 6 months to process a liver transplant application, then months to years to actually receive the transplant.
The application process has two parts: medical evaluation and financial means. The medical evaluation is a comprehensive evaluation to determine that you're a good candidate for transplant, that the cancer has not spread beyond the liver, and that you're psychologically fit for the transplant. The financial means evaluation... well, if you don't have the financial means, you do NOT get listed on the transplant list. Period. The only way to get a liver transplant without financial means is if you're an emergency case with sudden liver failure. Oh, you also need to have a designated caregiver who commits to taking time off work to take care if you, if/when necessary.
Once the application process starts, it can take 5 months to actually get on the transplant list. If the winter holidays occur fall in this time period, make that 6 months. If they accidentally list you on the non-cancer waiting list (with lower priority than the cancer waiting list), it might be another month (total 7 months) by the time somebody catches this mistake and it gets corrected. Most likely it will be YOU who catches the mistake, because nobody else is paying attention. If YOU fail to catch this error, the patient may be on the wrong (lower priority) waiting list indefinitely.
Once you're listed, it could take weeks to years to get the transplant. For non-cancer patients, the priority is determined strictly by a function of three blood test results: bilirubin, creatinine, and INR. As these levels go up, you develop ascites (fluid in abdomen), encephalopathy (cloudy mind), and then it gets worse. The problem is, you typically lose weight as you get sicker, and as you lose weight, the creatinine level goes DOWN, so your priority gets lower, initially! If you're lucky enough to be in Oregon or Florida, with no motorcycle helmet laws, you might get your transplant in a few months. If you're in Southern California or New York, you might be waiting a year or longer, progress to extreme illness and hospitalization, and be on the verge of death before getting the transplant. These are the patients who take 6 months to recover from the transplant. Often it takes days to weeks for the transplanted liver to start functioning. These patient have been IV fed for so long that the digestive tract is initially dysfunctional. They have to start with limited plain-cracker diets. Because their gut microbes have been ravaged, their gastric emissions are horrendous foul smelling.
If you're a liver cancer patient (like Jobs) the good thing is, you'll probably get your transplant sooner than the non-cancer patients, because liver cancer transplant priority goes up strictly by time on waiting list. "Sooner" is relative to when you got listed. If you trusted your Kaiser doctor and didn't sense any urgency, you probably didn't apply for the transplant until it was almost too late (there are limits are tumor size for transplant). If you are well-informed and proactively asked for a transplant application, you might get your transplant before you start to feel any symptoms of a dysfunctional liver. This is probably wha
How does that work? (Bear in mind, I work in the healthcare insurance industry, so I know of what I speak). What amazes me is that people somehow think their insurance is this magical creature that makes money and pays these excesses/is a charity covering that cost.
That money is still coming out of you, you're just put on an indirect payment plan!
Imagine a more direct method of the same: "Well, your bill is $40. Or you can pay me $40/month for the next four months."
Some would have you believe that the latter is a good deal, because it means, in theory, if you're not denied coverage, rescinded for some real or implied reason, etc, etc, that when you go to the emergency room for a couple of days and come home with a bill equal to many people's annual salary, you reap the benefits of insurance, forgetting that without the implied acceptance of such high rates, your hospital stay wouldn't have cost anywhere near as much in the first place.
I used to work for a corporate law firm in Australia. They charged up to $600/hr for legal work, more when they went into court. Companies happily paid this, because legal expenses are tax deductible. The company knows they get to write it off, so the law firms can make a mint. When was the last time you heard of a law firm going bankrupt?
Doctors are being advised to invest in MRI, LASIK. Leaving aside the interesting side effect that doctors who own or own shares in an MRI machine/practice are up to 10% more likely to refer you for an MRI, this is a fantastic investment, because of people like you and me on insurance. You can pay $1, 1.5M for an MRI machine, and see your investment paid off within a year, quite easily, and then anything beyond that is a nice skim of upwards of $500,000 a year in profit. Why? Because we, the working stiff, are paying upwards of $1,800 for an hours worth of diagnostic procedure (and again, remember, "insurance" isn't paying it. You are. Insurance is just giving you a nice payment plan).