An African American man who has waited more than five years for a kidney transplant is suing for $1 million in damages.
“He had this ongoing delay in the process to get a kidney,” Matthew L. Venezia, the patient’s attorney, said Tuesday, according to the Washington Post. You could have adjusted his time. But they didn’t… Many patients don’t have an 18-month grace period.”
Last week, African American Anthony Randall filed a lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where he has been waiting for a kidney for more than five years, and against the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which organizes the American transplant system.
The patient wants to represent more than 27,500 black patients who would be in the same disadvantageous situation as him and is seeking $1 million in financial compensation for the delays caused by an algorithm used up until last January .
The inclusion of a “modifier for patients identified as Black…resulted in a systemic underestimation of kidney disease severity in several Black patients.” In the case of organ transplants in particular, this could have had a negative impact on the deadlines on the list,” the UNOS board of directors also stated last June.
But as recently as January, hospitals were reportedly ordered to stop using that part of the algorithm and to inform black patients that they may be eligible for an adjustment to their accumulated “time-out” expectation,” according to the American media.
If those adjustments had been made more quickly, Anthony Randall would likely have received the kidney that would allow him to work by now, he complained in the lawsuit, since he said he was second on the waiting list in December. .
Two similar lawsuits were reportedly filed in New York and Washington in 2021 and 2022. There are currently an estimated 104,000 patients on the organ donation waiting list in the United States, most of whom are awaiting a kidney.
In 2022, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine also reported that black patients would wait an average of 727 days and white patients 374 days on the list, according to one study.