Hospital Confirms Steve Jobs's Liver Transplant

CNet is reporting that the hospital where Apple's CEO reportedly got a liver transplant two months ago has now confirmed the truth of these reports. "Steve Jobs underwent his liver transplant about two months ago at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, the hospital confirmed Tuesday. Jobs, who returned to work Apple's campus in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday after a six-month medical leave, 'is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis,' according to a statement by Dr. James D. Eason, the program director of the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute. ... While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs's approval, he cited patient confidentially in saying that he could not reveal any further information on the specifics of Jobs's surgery."

Comments

How long was the wait?

[DarkNinja75]

My non-existent medical knowledge tells me there's a long wait for organ transplants. I wonder if Steve received accelerated care thanks to his status.

Re:How long was the wait?

[0100010001010011]

Livers are like starfish. You can hack them apart and they regrow. Heck, here is a story about a split liver helping 2 people.

You can also partially remove some from a living person (Lisa?) and give it to someone.

Unlike... kidneys, lungs, hearts, etc.

shopping for short wait times

[bcrowell]

I'd tend to agree that this is useless voyeurism, except that there are some ethical issues that come up in transplants when the patient is very rich. The NY Times had an article about this today, and they specifically mentioned this hospital as one that had a very short average wait time of 3.8 months, compared to the national average of 12.3 months. "If you had access to a jet and had six hours to get anywhere in the country, you'd have a wide choice of programs," they quote one doctor as saying.

Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins!

[Goldberg's Pants]

Still absolutely amazed at this. Given Apple said it was a hormone imbalance... Isn't deliberately misleading investors the sort of thing the SEC takes a dim view of? Don't know my US stock market laws and all that but I can't imagine the guy who IS, to many people, Apple, being in a life threatening condition and the shareholders not being told being seen as a good thing. Yes it protected the share price, but didn't they lie?

Whatever, glad Jobs is okay. One of the few people in the tech industry I admire.

I feel anger.

[reporter]

Steve Jobs is another example of how wealth buys health and an easy life.

The USA has several organ-transplant centers. In theory, patients can enter their name into the waiting list of any or all centers.

Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list. Physicians cannot just freeze a liver for a week until you can arrange a plane ticket to reach the center. Livers are perishable items.

Due to the aforementioned cost and logistical issues, patients are effectively restricted to only 1 center. However, Steve Jobs -- with his billions of dollars -- can enter his name into all the waiting lists of all the centers. He can hire a private jet service to take him to any center immediately.

Life just is not fair.

Re:I feel anger.

[timeOday]

Here's a list of random rationalizations you could use to argue either way:

1. If this story is true, he apparently received a liver instead of somebody else who was a better candidate (in the sense of a better prognosis). That is, in expectation (actuarially), his actions took years from somebody's life.
2. Most of us with health coverage and some money will, at some point, receive some expensive treatment where the money could have instead been used to provide more basic, life-saving treatment to several poor people. Especially if you re-consider this analysis on a global basis, given that people in Africa die every day die from want of a few dollars in health care, or even clean water.
3. Due to Jobs ingenuity and force of will, the economy is probably larger than it would otherwise be by a few billion dollars, with some fraction of that (i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars) providing thousands of hard-working nerds and their families with money for life-saving health care services.
4. Distrust in the equity of organ distribution may decrease the number of donors. Some people won't like the thought that their organs are most likely to live on in rich old white guys with short life expectancies who clawed their way to the front of the line like aristocrats boarding lifeboats at the sinking of the Titanic (whether or not that is a myth).

Re:I feel anger.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of a sad world you live in - you reckon Steve only did what he did for money and power? There was no passion for the tech there at all? You reckon Woz was the same?

I'm no Apple freak, and it wouldn't honestly surprise me to find out Jobs did do it just for the money - but theres many who do their jobs and advance humanity either for that reason alone, or because they have a passion for what they do, and would do it no matter the money, as long as they could live (It does not require $100k+ to live).

Its basically the same argument the pro-copyright lobby uses on here - without monetary incentive our culture and humanity in general would fail - really that argument says more about the way you view your own life, than the way the world actually works.

Can you honestly tell me that if bin men or fast food workers got paid the same as BA's or coders (or whatever you actually are) that would take that job instead of the creative one? If you can then... I hesitate to say this - but are you sure you're in the right line of work? If you have no love for your profession other than its monetary rewards, I do actually pity you.

Thats not even to mention, that if everyone was a creator, there would be no-one to run the machines or provide the services. You can't honestly say that these people aren't necessary, teachers, paramedics, even bin men and park rangers etc. They work comparable, if not more hours than the creative people, in mundane and soul destroying jobs that keep the society we love functioning. They deserve as much from the said society as we do. We wouldn't have anything if it wasn't for the existence of these people - there would be no society to build our designs, fund our creativeness or appreciate and pay for our end results.

This is where the right usually goes wrong - they assume they're 'better humans' due to their own arbitrary rules - either not realising how much everyone relies on everybody, or not caring to the point of exploiting them.

Re:I feel anger.

[Rakarra]

Yes, life is not fair, but honestly this is not a case of someone being rich and privileged because he was born into the right family. Steve Jobs as much as anyone has earned his money. He's worked hard and he's added a lot to society. If we tried to cut him down so things were more fair, then it would be a loss to all of us.

Everybody knows about Steve Jobs, but no one knows about Steve Wozniak, who was the actual technology innovator.

The history of Silicon Valley is full of people with technical brilliance who could never get anywhere. Business acumen is at least as important, and I think it's a skill that many Slashdotters undervalue.

Conservative blind side...

[gillbates]

Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done.

Disclaimer: I am a conservative. So I recognize the above as a variation on "the free market cures all ills" and the conservative notion that more wealth will make all of society better.

It won't.

The reason is basic economics. If everyone were rich and powerful; if everyone could create cool things like Steve Jobs does, then being a CEO would pay minimum wage. Compared to the rest of the world, America is rich on a GDP basis. However, compared to the rest of the world on a quality of life basis, America does little better than some third world countries. Consider:

• Even though I have a "good" job as an engineer, making close to the median salary in the field, I:
  1. Cannot afford to buy a house in the same community I where work.
  2. Had my first child at a decade older than my father.
  3. Have no real, viable retirement plan. No, a 401k is not a retirement plan; it is a retirement gamble. Some people win, some don't (like my mother, who was forced into retirement after her 401 lost half its value.)
• If I lose my job, I can lose both my home and my healthcare. Compare this with some of the poorer socialist countries where this is not even a possibility. One would think that making hundreds of times what my third world counterparts do would afford me a greater degree of social security, but sadly it does not.
• The fact that urban America has transitioned from single-earner households to dual-earner households makes it much more difficult to live in urban areas. Families with only a single income find that they cannot afford the house they need. Sure, I could move to a less expensive rural area - that is, if I could find a job there.

I went to college. I made the grade. But so did millions of others. Every three years, the US University system grants college degrees to the equivalent of the population of Chicago. These are the people with whom I compete for jobs. Even though my father was an unskilled laborer, he had far less competition and enjoyed a far greater standard of living than I do. Yes, we're all educated now. Did our education solve the problem of limited resources? No, it just allows us a greater understanding of economics, of why, after decade of career preparation, we are now worse off than our parents' generation.

Does the rising tide lift all boats? Sure, to some degree. I can afford gadgets that would have amazed my parents' generation. But yet, for all my education - for changing careers from programming to engineering to get a better salary; in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.

In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.

I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.

Re:Conservative blind side...

[Just Some Guy]

Cannot afford to buy a house in the same community I where work.

So move. Seriously. There are a million good reasons why you might want to live where you are, but they don't matter if you can't afford to live there. And you can't.

Had my first child at a decade older than my father.

?

Have no real, viable retirement plan. No, a 401k is not a retirement plan; it is a retirement gamble. Some people win, some don't (like my mother, who was forced into retirement after her 401 lost half its value.)

What's a "real, viable retirement plan"? A Big Three pension? I'll trust my future to my 401k over a board of directors any day of the week.

You claim to be a conservative while wishing that the government would validate your lifestyle choices. I don't quite get that.

Re:Conservative blind side...

[Zakabog]

• The fact that urban America has transitioned from single-earner households to dual-earner households makes it much more difficult to live in urban areas. Families with only a single income find that they cannot afford the house they need. Sure, I could move to a less expensive rural area - that is, if I could find a job there.

That's not it at all, it's the fact that a dual income family will think "Oh hey we've got all this money coming in since we're both working, why buy that $150,000 house when we can "easily" afford that $300,000 house in the nicer part of town."

Then one person loses their income, then the family can't make the house payments, then they're forced to sell. It's all due to people wanting nice things, and not budgeting for future problems.

 

Does the rising tide lift all boats? Sure, to some degree. I can afford gadgets that would have amazed my parents' generation. But yet, for all my education - for changing careers from programming to engineering to get a better salary; in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.

Not too long ago I was in the market for buying a house, I was making around 25K a year, which is quite low for a full time job (it was a startup company), and most of the houses I looked at were two family houses that I could have easily afforded on my salary even without the rental income, even if I lost my job for a year. The reason was that I had money saved up for the purchase of a house. I could have made a large down payment, while still having money left over to cover the mortgage for a year. Plus, if I was renting the other unit, then I wouldn't need to use any of my salary towards the house as the rental unit would have easily covered themortgage and taxes.

It's about living within your means, people today think "Well I'm making all this money I might as well use it for something I'll enjoy right now" rather than "I'm making all this money, I should save it up for something I may need in the future", or "I'm making all this money, why should I buy that cheap boring house when I can afford this really expensive luxurious home."

Re:Conservative blind side...

[NtroP]

in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.

Although I can sympathize with the frustration and apparent hopelessness of your situation, I have to disagree. The reason our parents had a better standard of living is that they did not live in the same "credit-based" society. In fact, my parents were still very much influenced by the great depression and the frugality that entailed.

Disclaimer: I was struggling under a huge load of debt that I'm still crawling out of, but have come to realize a few things as I have become debt-free and a master of my own destiny.

A vast percentage of our income goes to taxes and covering our debt-load. There is little I can do about my taxes, but I can have an impact on my debt and the interest I pay on it. Look at it this way: Last year I paid over $20,000 in interest on my mortgage. The year before that I paid almost that much interest on my credit card debt. Those two things were basically eating up a whole person's income in our household budget. That isn't even considering the interest we were paying on student loans, car loans, personal lines of credit, etc.

Two years ago I realized I was spending so much of my time working to just pay interest on my lifestyle that I wasn't able to make any headway. So my family went cold turkey. We went to a cash basis. We scraped together $1,000.00 cash that we locked in our safe for emergencies and put every other penny we could scrape together into paying off our debt. We sold our toys. We worked extra hours. We stopped eating out. We turned down the heat and bought second-hand sweaters. We made a strict written budget and stuck with it.

Over the last two years we've been able to pay off almost $90,000 in debt. Debt! Money we were borrowing to help us live the lifestyle we deserved but were unwilling to pay for up front. Had we lived this frugally from the beginning we would have just put that same $90,000.00 to use working for us and investing in our future. In two more years we could have paid cash for a $180,000.00 house and not had a house-payment! When I see that, it makes me sick to realize how much money I've been wasting on interest and "toys" that could have gone toward giving my family the lifestyle they really deserve. We've been living on a borrowed lifestyle. Well, no more!

We should be completely debt-free in about another year if things were to stay the same. However, we just learned that my wife will be taking a huge pay-cut in order to keep her job (to the tune of $30,000.00 a year). It terrifies me to think what sort of financial position we'd have been in if we hadn't started paying off debt two years ago. Back then, we were "doing fine" in that we were easily able to make our monthly payments and have some left over for "fun". But had we kept on that path a $30K reduction in income would have bankrupted us. Now it just means it will take us a little longer to get out of debt. But get out we will and I will never borrow another cent from anyone in my life.

Just thinking about the sort of life I could have had for my family had I lived the way my parents did and followed their example. Instead I criticized them for being so "stingy" and not getting the things they could "afford" and not "leveraging" their assets. Well, looks like the laughs on me. They are retired now. Last year they paid cash for a house. Paid cash to fix it up. and now have it rented out. Their money is working for them. They have no debt. They are taking their profits and looking for the next good opportunity to come along. They are positioned well to take advantage of the many deals this economy has for them.

I've sat both my kids down (they're 19, and 20) and laid out to them w

Re:Get over yourself.

[sorak]

Steve Jobs is another example of how wealth buys health and an easy life.

Yeah, cause being rich kept him from getting pancreatic cancer in the first place, right?

Oh, wait.

-jcr

WTF? So, your standard of fairness is that anything goes as long as rich people are not immune to disease?