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If this is your first Z-Pack, welcome - I'm Zach.

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🫁 The thing no one is allowed to sell

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When you hear the word “monopoly", you may think of tech giants, or even the famous board game that terrorized our childhoods (I still cannot forgive the people who have wronged me).

But I bet you haven’t heard about this insane monopoly —

The TL;DR of why our current organ donor system is shite:

Once upon a time, there was no unified system for organ transplants in the U.S.

Enter the OPTN: Then Congress decided to set up the Organ Procurement Transplantation Network (OPTN) in the 1980s. This government network gave an exclusive contract to the only nonprofit that existed, called United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), that could manage the workload of organ transplantation across all states.

But UNOS happens to be THE WORST. If you think Delta is bad at losing your luggage, imagine being literally 15 times worse when it comes to damaging cargo, but the cargo is organs!!!

UNOS is straight up Urkel.

For hospitals to get someone a donated organ, they have to call UNOS, who has to hit up their local contractor to deliver it. But UNOS is notorious for neglect, like leaving organs out in the heat for hours or even showing up with them damaged - isn’t that fucking crazy??? And this is a huge issue because only 2% of deaths are organ donation-eligible. Why? Because so many things have to go right to get a proper match, and we have an opt-in system.

How has UNOS gotten away with this crap?

Remember how I mentioned the government granted UNOS a monopoly in the 80s? Well, that’s still the case! Now they try and keep it that way.

Not only that, but Congress divided up babysitting duties to multiple government agencies, so each agency thinks the other is doing the job!

So what do we do about this shit show?

Priority #1: Break up the UNOS monopoly, which the government is already working on. If we don’t, we’ll keep losing 17,500 kidneys, 7,500 livers, 1,500 hearts, and 1,500 lungs that should’ve been transplanted!

Priority #2: We should try and commercialize the work scientists are doing on developing lab-grown organs and xenotransplantation, or gene editing animals’ organs to then transplant into humans.

Priority #3:

*here comes my pitch (not original) - brace yourself*

We create a government-regulated market for selling our organs - woohoo!

Ok, don’t be freaked out that Iran is the only country in the world that does this currently, just pay attention to the fact that it works!

The future is already happening, but we need to make it happen faster!

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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