His belly swollen, his energy flagging, 45-year-old Jorge Perez Remache waits in his Queens apartment for the word that his turn has come to receive a life-saving liver transplant. Though he has suffered from cirrhosis for 10 years, the chance of that happening is virtually zero.
A thousand miles south in tiny Morven, Ga., Katryna Grisson— equally sick, just three years older and, like Perez Remache, on Medicaid — awaits the same miracle. Her odds, however, are substantially better, because the ratio of available livers to people who need them is more favorable in the southeast.
“Basically, it’s not fair that my dad has to wait until he gets sicker and sicker,” said Alex Perez, Perez Remache’s 22-year-old son. “What’s the point of getting [a liver] when you’re sicker? Before they find a liver, he’s dead already.”
Under a recently proposed plan, that could change. The people who control transplants in the United States are preparing to consider a way to address the decades-old geographic disparity in liver allocation. The plan would alter how the precious organs are distributed and could shift hundreds of livers across state and regional borders.