army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong

6 [deleted] 06 November 2012 10:38PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 16 November 2012 06:34:19PM 2 points [-]

An average heart transplant costs about 1.1 million dollars

Does that include the cost of finding a donor?

Comment author: [deleted] 17 November 2012 04:15:29AM 2 points [-]

There are other estimates available on the web, but I worked off this one:

http://www.transplantliving.org/before-the-transplant/financing-a-transplant/the-costs/

Cost of finding a donor is under 'procurement'. As far as I can tell, the immunosuppressant entry only covers the first year of post-transplant care, so factoring in a five-year mean survival time gives the $1.1 million figure I mentioned.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 November 2012 08:10:04AM 2 points [-]

$1.1M was at least an order of magnitude larger than my guesstimate for the price of the transplant itself, so I wondered if that figure included something else. [follows link] OK, the figure for "physician during transplant" was indeed within an order of magnitude of what I expected, but hardly any of the other expenses had even occurred to me.