"They're not even transplanting your bone marrow. They're transplanting these baby blood cells," said Jeff Rowes, an attorney with the Institute for Justice. It represented some families who'd had trouble finding donors, and was pushing for a study of compensation as a next step.
Not so fast, says the Obama administration. The government now has proposed a regulation to keep the ban intact by rewriting some legal definitions to clarify that it covers marrow-producing stem cells no matter how they're derived.
"It is not a matter of how you obtain it," said Shelley Grant of the Health Resources and Services Administration's transplant division. "Whether we obtain them through the marrow or the circulatory system, it is those stem cells that provide a potential cure."
The proposal is open for public comment through Monday.
"Should we be paying for parts of people's bodies which then can be used to help other people?" said Mary Ann Baily, a Hastings Center fellow who has long studied the question of transplant compensation. "We've been very reluctant to do that partly because it's a very messy thing to do and to manage so that bad things don't happen," such as exploiting the poor.
Moreover, some patients fare better with marrow cells derived from bone, said Dr. Jeffrey Chell of Be the Match, the National Marrow Donor Program. The registry opposes financial incentives as "really another form of coercion," he said, noting that international registries that share donor information with the U.S. also ban compensation.