How One Father Created an Organ Empire [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/us/national-kidney-registry-paired-organ-donation.html

https://archive.ph/xp2VL

How One Father Created an Organ Empire
The National Kidney Registry has matched thousands of kidney donors with recipients. It has also paid millions of dollars to a company owned by its founder.
By Danielle Ivory, Grace Ashford and Robert Gebeloff
Dec. 27, 2025

The worst moment of Garet Hil’s life, he once said, came when he discovered he couldn’t donate a kidney to his sick 10-year-old daughter. By the time the girl found a match a couple of months later, Mr. Hil, an entrepreneur, had drawn up plans to transform the world of living organ donation.

His organization, the National Kidney Registry, started in 2007 with a simple idea: Donors who are incompatible with sick loved ones give their kidneys to a nationwide pool. The sick patients tap into that pool of strangers to find matches more quickly.

Since its founding, N.K.R. has enabled nearly 12,000 such swaps, called paired donations, far more than any other public or private program. The organization’s focus on technology and efficiency has jolted a sluggish system, many health experts said.

But at the same time, N.K.R. has created a multimillion-dollar business with considerable power over the flow of thousands of organs, according to interviews with more than 100 people in transplant medicine and a review of business records. Many doctors told The Times the stakes of these lifesaving exchanges were too high to be managed by a private company with little government oversight.

As N.K.R. has grown, it has charged hospitals steep fees for access to its registry of donors. Some of that cost is passed on to taxpayers through Medicare.

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