Moral Hazard in Organ Transplants

This essay describes a moral hazard problem in organ transplants. 

"Transplant programs are not evaluated by regulatory agencies to determine how well they use the organ donors available to them. Instead, they are judged primarily on how many of the patients they transplant are alive one year after surgery—an important but limited metric. The emphasis on one-year survival makes transplant programs overly cautious, letting viable organs go unused instead of using organs that they fear might harm their report card."

The essay includes an example. A surgery team turned down lungs that were good but not great matches for Patient A because another Patient B who had received a transplant had recently died. Patient A subsequently died while waiting for a match.

The emphasis on survival rates also reduces the propensity of doctors to transplant organs into patients who are likely to die within a year; e.g., patients who are old and weak and patients who suffer from other life-threatening diseases.