Economics

While the costs to Medicare of solid organ transplants are varied and considerable, the total Medicare expenditure of $4.2 billion for solid organ transplant recipients in 2013 remains less than 1% of all Medicare expenditures. Kidney transplant remains one of the most cost-effective surgical interventions in medicine and exhibits a rare feature in that it is generally known to be cost-saving in the long term. For patients covered by Medicare, lung transplant is one of the more costly solid organ transplants performed. This chapter reports pretransplant costs for lung candidates to allow investigators to further explore the relative cost of lung transplant compared with alternative management.