How Can Americans Improve Organ Donation?

Britain’s Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, looks through a dual console of the da Vinci robot while lead surgeon Vin Paleri (out of frame) conducts a robotic assisted tongue base hemiglossectomy surgery on a patient during his visit to the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018.
Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, looks through a dual console of the da Vinci robot while lead surgeon Vin Paleri (out of frame) conducts a robotic assisted tongue base hemiglossectomy surgery on a patient during his visit to the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018. AP Photo
Britain’s Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, looks through a dual console of the da Vinci robot while lead surgeon Vin Paleri (out of frame) conducts a robotic assisted tongue base hemiglossectomy surgery on a patient during his visit to the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018.
Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, looks through a dual console of the da Vinci robot while lead surgeon Vin Paleri (out of frame) conducts a robotic assisted tongue base hemiglossectomy surgery on a patient during his visit to the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018. AP Photo

How Can Americans Improve Organ Donation?

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Low organ donation is a big problem in the United States. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, an average of 20 people die each day waiting for a transplant. Just short of 100 percent of American adults say they support organ donation, but only 58 percent opt-in to be donors. For possible solutions, we had Worldview’s Jenny Friedland talk with bioethicist Greg Moorlock, a senior teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. England will go to an opt-out system for organ donation starting in Spring 2020. That means that everybody is assumed to be an organ donor unless they declare otherwise. We’ll see how that’s different from the American approach.