Should PREDICTED Smokers Get Transplants?
By Tom Douglas
Jack has smoked a packet a day since he was 22. Now, at 52, he needs a heart and lung transplant.
Should he be refused a transplant to allow a non-smoker with a similar medical need to receive one? More generally: does his history of smoking reduce his claim to scarce medical resources?
If it does, then what should we say about Jill, who has never touched a cigarette, but is predicted to become a smoker in the future? Perhaps Jill is 20 years old and from an ethnic group with very high rates of smoking uptake in their 20s. Or perhaps a machine-learning tool has analysed her past facebook posts and google searches and identified her as a ‘high risk’ for taking up smoking—she has an appetite for risk, an unusual susceptibility to peer pressure, and a large number of smokers among her friends. Should Jill’s predicted smoking count against her, were she to need a transplant? Intuitively, it shouldn’t. But why not?