The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ranks OPOs into 3 different tiers based on their performance. Rankings incorporate the number of donors and the number of organs transplanted. The majority of the nation’s OPOs are failing to meet Tier 1 standards, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths each year, which disproportionately harm patients of color. The map below shows the current ranking of U.S. OPOs by location, based on the most recent data available (2021). Find more information here
National organ transplant waiting list as of October 1, 2024
104,323
Number of Americans in 2021 who died each day because they didn’t get a needed transplant
31
Annual cost to Medicare of dialysis
$36 billion
Patients of color are less likely to receive organ transplants than white patients because of inferior OPO service.
See more dataOn August 3, 2022, the Senate Finance Committee held a bipartisan hearing about UNOS's severe performance, technological, and oversight failures.
He survived Covid-19, but his lungs were ravaged. After months of deep sedation, he is delirious, his muscles atrophied. And this 61-year-old still cannot breathe on his own.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently finalized reforms targeted at the government contractors that run the organ donation system.
Public filings by organ procurement organizations and their lobbyists indicate that lobbying expenditures have risen by nearly 500% since 2017—in addition to other undisclosed influence spending on law firms and public relations advisors—apparently designed to stop or weaken the proposed changes.