Comments: 402 +- Apple: Hospital Confirms Steve Jobs's Liver Transplant on Tuesday June 23, @10:26PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday June 23, @10:26PM
from the so-just-say-so-already dept.
from the so-just-say-so-already dept.
CNet is reporting that the hospital where Apple's CEO reportedly got a liver transplant two months ago has now confirmed the truth of these reports. "Steve Jobs underwent his liver transplant about two months ago at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, the hospital confirmed Tuesday. Jobs, who returned to work Apple's campus in Cupertino, Calif., on Monday after a six-month medical leave, 'is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis,' according to a statement by Dr. James D. Eason, the program director of the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute. ... While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs's approval, he cited patient confidentially in saying that he could not reveal any further information on the specifics of Jobs's surgery."
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Science: Steve Jobs Had a Liver Transplant Two Months Ago 436 comments
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I did not think that (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They are if they come from virgin first borne children swapped for an iPhone 3GS upgrade.
Re:I did not think that (Score:4, Funny)
That might result in you needing a liver transplant.
Parent
I feel dirty (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel anger. (Score:5, Interesting)
The USA has several organ-transplant centers. In theory, patients can enter their name into the waiting list of any or all centers.
Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list. Physicians cannot just freeze a liver for a week until you can arrange a plane ticket to reach the center. Livers are perishable items.
Due to the aforementioned cost and logistical issues, patients are effectively restricted to only 1 center. However, Steve Jobs -- with his billions of dollars -- can enter his name into all the waiting lists of all the centers. He can hire a private jet service to take him to any center immediately.
Life just is not fair.
Parent
Re:I feel anger. (Score:5, Insightful)
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done. When he got fired from, he started another company that made something cool. That's not easy, but he did it.
We don't all have to start our own companies, but if we were all just as productive in our respective fields, we probably would already have synthetic liver replacements. We might have green coal plants. We might have more efficient ways to grow food, allowing the existing farmers to focus their attention on more interesting things (oh, well we already have that one to quite an extent).
This is the way of the future, and it's where the left gets off track: instead of trying to destroy stupid bankers who get rich off naive customers, without producing anything real, the key is to educate those 'stupid' customers to create real things, and to contribute to society in real ways; then the bankers will go off and f*** themselves because everyone will see them for what they are, leeches on society.
Parent
Most people cannot handle it (Score:5, Insightful)
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful.
To paraphrase Bill Cosby (on "mind-expanding" drugs): But what if you're an asshole?
The same applies here:
Most people are the ones I see littering, driving like idiots, buying stupid junk, getting drunk and vomiting in my sunroof, etc.
Do I want them to be any more powerful than they are? Hell, no!
Parent
Re:I feel anger. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Conservative blind side... (Score:5, Interesting)
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done.
Disclaimer: I am a conservative. So I recognize the above as a variation on "the free market cures all ills" and the conservative notion that more wealth will make all of society better.
It won't.
The reason is basic economics. If everyone were rich and powerful; if everyone could create cool things like Steve Jobs does, then being a CEO would pay minimum wage. Compared to the rest of the world, America is rich on a GDP basis. However, compared to the rest of the world on a quality of life basis, America does little better than some third world countries. Consider:
I went to college. I made the grade. But so did millions of others. Every three years, the US University system grants college degrees to the equivalent of the population of Chicago. These are the people with whom I compete for jobs. Even though my father was an unskilled laborer, he had far less competition and enjoyed a far greater standard of living than I do. Yes, we're all educated now. Did our education solve the problem of limited resources? No, it just allows us a greater understanding of economics, of why, after decade of career preparation, we are now worse off than our parents' generation.
Does the rising tide lift all boats? Sure, to some degree. I can afford gadgets that would have amazed my parents' generation. But yet, for all my education - for changing careers from programming to engineering to get a better salary; in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.
In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.
I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.
Parent
Re:Conservative blind side... (Score:4, Insightful)
Posting anonymously to avoid undoing moderation, but this just had to be answered. You're making a pretty serious error in logic here:
In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.
Those same conservatives that were screaming about unmarried couples (an issue to social conservatives) were pushing for deregulation of corporations (an issue for fiscal conservatives). You're conflating a concern with social morality (gay marriage, marriage of couples that live together and/or have children, abortion, etc) with a concern for corporate morality. In general (and there are exceptions on both sides) liberals tend to more less concerned about the latter, but more concerned about the former, while conservatives are the opposite.
Liberals (in general) don't care whether or not a couple is married, because their marriage or lack of one is not impacting society in general. It's a matter of personal choice. I lived with my wife for 6 years before we formalized the arrangement with a wedding. How were we hurting anyone? By contrast liberals (in general) care whether a company is trying to screw its customers, because that problem DOES impact society in general. It's hurting the customer or customers being screwed in an unfair way.
Conservatives (in general) care whether a couple is married, because for them to live together otherwise is a violation of the moral code of the conservative. They seem willing to make and enforce laws that require individuals to follow the moral code that they themselves have chosen to follow. Hence laws against gay marriage. It won't hurt society in any way to let couples of the same sex join together in the same way that couples of the opposite sex do, but it's against a moral code that conservative believe in so they want to stop it. Conservatives also (in general), I will grant you, care whether a company is screwing it's customers, but they seems to care about this in a abstract way. They might say it's immoral, but because they believe that market forces will eventually weed out the immoral or unfair in the market they are unwilling to directly legislate against it much of the time.
"Morality" is not really the problem here. Everyone has different ideas of what is or is not moral. I have no moral problem with two people marrying or not marrying as they they see fit, but you clearly do. The problem is that our government is not trying to do the most good for the most people. It's trying to do the most good for big companies and hoping that THEY will do the most good for the most people. Companies, however, are almost totally without either morals or scruples. It's a side affect of being made up of too many people for anyone of them to take responsibility for the actions of the whole.
Parent
Re:Conservative blind side... (Score:5, Interesting)
in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.
Although I can sympathize with the frustration and apparent hopelessness of your situation, I have to disagree. The reason our parents had a better standard of living is that they did not live in the same "credit-based" society. In fact, my parents were still very much influenced by the great depression and the frugality that entailed.
Disclaimer: I was struggling under a huge load of debt that I'm still crawling out of, but have come to realize a few things as I have become debt-free and a master of my own destiny.
A vast percentage of our income goes to taxes and covering our debt-load. There is little I can do about my taxes, but I can have an impact on my debt and the interest I pay on it. Look at it this way: Last year I paid over $20,000 in interest on my mortgage. The year before that I paid almost that much interest on my credit card debt. Those two things were basically eating up a whole person's income in our household budget. That isn't even considering the interest we were paying on student loans, car loans, personal lines of credit, etc.
Two years ago I realized I was spending so much of my time working to just pay interest on my lifestyle that I wasn't able to make any headway. So my family went cold turkey. We went to a cash basis. We scraped together $1,000.00 cash that we locked in our safe for emergencies and put every other penny we could scrape together into paying off our debt. We sold our toys. We worked extra hours. We stopped eating out. We turned down the heat and bought second-hand sweaters. We made a strict written budget and stuck with it.
Over the last two years we've been able to pay off almost $90,000 in debt. Debt! Money we were borrowing to help us live the lifestyle we deserved but were unwilling to pay for up front. Had we lived this frugally from the beginning we would have just put that same $90,000.00 to use working for us and investing in our future. In two more years we could have paid cash for a $180,000.00 house and not had a house-payment! When I see that, it makes me sick to realize how much money I've been wasting on interest and "toys" that could have gone toward giving my family the lifestyle they really deserve. We've been living on a borrowed lifestyle. Well, no more!
We should be completely debt-free in about another year if things were to stay the same. However, we just learned that my wife will be taking a huge pay-cut in order to keep her job (to the tune of $30,000.00 a year). It terrifies me to think what sort of financial position we'd have been in if we hadn't started paying off debt two years ago. Back then, we were "doing fine" in that we were easily able to make our monthly payments and have some left over for "fun". But had we kept on that path a $30K reduction in income would have bankrupted us. Now it just means it will take us a little longer to get out of debt. But get out we will and I will never borrow another cent from anyone in my life.
Just thinking about the sort of life I could have had for my family had I lived the way my parents did and followed their example. Instead I criticized them for being so "stingy" and not getting the things they could "afford" and not "leveraging" their assets. Well, looks like the laughs on me. They are retired now. Last year they paid cash for a house. Paid cash to fix it up. and now have it rented out. Their money is working for them. They have no debt. They are taking their profits and looking for the next good opportunity to come along. They are positioned well to take advantage of the many deals this economy has for them.
I've sat both my kids down (they're 19, and 20) and laid out to them w
Parent
Re:I feel anger. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
There's no reason to be angry. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people have more money and more power and better opportunities than others, but that doesn't make it automatically unfair. Would you cry "foul" if a sitting President took the same actions as Jobs? It's not like he cheated the system (as a President probably would). Would you be angry with a friend for buying a new TV or laptop that you wanted but couldn't afford?
Practically speaking, most patients enter their name into the waiting list of the single most accessible center. The patients then arrange to live near the center as their name approaches the top of the list.
Given that all centers were equally accessible to him, he did exactly what every patient does. He is smart enough to know that a queue of 295 is significantly lower than a queue of 1615, and all other things being equal the rational choice is to go for the shortest line. If you were in Jobs's place, what would you have done differently?
What is the point of having wealth if you don't use it to your advantage? Of course it can be misused, but you're going to have to work a lot harder to argue that that is the case here.
Parent
Get over yourself. (Score:3, Insightful)
Steve Jobs is another example of how wealth buys health and an easy life.
Yeah, cause being rich kept him from getting pancreatic cancer in the first place, right?
Oh, wait.
-jcr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Life just is not fair.
Yep. Get over it. Your only other option is to stay angry and forfeit the good things that life can give you.
Someone in the 3rd world, who can't afford to eat every day would look at you whining about potential health issues and think it's unfair that you have the luxury to be angry instead of slaving away 16 hours a day for subsistence wages, or starving for lack of work.
Re:I feel anger. (Score:4, Insightful)
You guys have a private health care system. Forget about Steve Jobs having a plane so he can fly to a transplant centre and start worrying about the large portion of your population that can't afford basic health care.
Yeah, that means YOU are the rich and privileged one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And there are a whole boatload of people who go to AA and never kick the habit. You can't just count successes and declare yourself helpful. There's never been any scientific study of AA effectiveness and the whole emphasis on converting people to christian values makes it entirely suspect.
Funny that (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs 3.0 (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but the Steve Jobs update adds new features such as cut and paste, MMS, Spotlight search and an improved calendar!
What the doctor didn't confirm... (Score:5, Funny)
Apple will house the new weapon, tentatively codenamed iDontThinkSo in an underground bunker beneath their Cupertino campus.
Because of Mr Jobs' prolific temper, executives were initially concerned about the potential for misuse the weapon presented and the possibility of its use against enemies who were not truly dire. For this reason, a killswitch was installed to be controlled remotely via Phil Schiller's iPhone.
Analysts predict the new weapon will bolster the company's share price by at least 20% and should by them enough time to complete the fully cybernetic Jobs 2.0.
Parts (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe now he'll understand why it's so important to be able to install third-party parts and he'll decide to loosen-up the licensing a little bit.
Re:Parts (Score:5, Funny)
After becoming irate, he is told to STFW and RTFM. At 8:00am, bleary eyed from searching endless forums he calls up work and tells them he's sick and won't be coming in until he's better. 6 months later, he takes a shower, ready to head back to work after finally fixing his problem himself.
He gazes up at the enormous face of the penguin. Eighteen years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark feathers. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Linux.
Parent
A good bet (Score:4, Funny)
shopping for short wait times (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd tend to agree that this is useless voyeurism, except that there are some ethical issues that come up in transplants when the patient is very rich. The NY Times had an article [nytimes.com] about this today, and they specifically mentioned this hospital as one that had a very short average wait time of 3.8 months, compared to the national average of 12.3 months. "If you had access to a jet and had six hours to get anywhere in the country, you'd have a wide choice of programs," they quote one doctor as saying.
I heard he was having a heart transplant (Score:3, Funny)
but they couldn't find his old one.
I received my delivery yesterday... (Score:5, Funny)
This is going to go well with Fava beans and a nice Chianti
So it was a lie (Score:5, Funny)
A apple a day, doesn't keep the doctor away.
Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins! (Score:5, Informative)
Are you dense?
From your own quote:
While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs' approval ...
Parent
Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins! (Score:4, Interesting)
Still absolutely amazed at this. Given Apple said it was a hormone imbalance... Isn't deliberately misleading investors the sort of thing the SEC takes a dim view of? Don't know my US stock market laws and all that but I can't imagine the guy who IS, to many people, Apple, being in a life threatening condition and the shareholders not being told being seen as a good thing. Yes it protected the share price, but didn't they lie?
Whatever, glad Jobs is okay. One of the few people in the tech industry I admire.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're assuming Steve told Apple and gave them permission to tell others. Regardless of SEC rules, he's under no obligation to expose his HIPAA-protected data, nor are Apple, it shareholders, or the SEC is in a position to ask. Moreover, even if someone at Apple knew of his actual condition they can't legally reveal it to others without his consent.
Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not exactly how it went down.
On January 5th, Jobs said that he had a hormone imbalance. On January 14th, he said that he had "learned [his] health issues are more complex than [he] originally thought".
A Whipple procedure really screws up your digestive system and almost everyone afterwards has bouts of weight loss, etc. It's altogether possible that his doctors thought that was going on until metastases were discovered between Jan 5th and Jan 14th.
It's a complicated matter, you know-- how much are stockholders entitled to know versus an executive's right to privacy in his medical information.
Parent
Jobs was probably in denial (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Given Apple's history when Jobs was not at the helm it's understandable that so many people would take an interest in his health. Again, given history, it's a safe bet Apple will do well while controlled by Jobs and will do quite poorly should he remove himself. Many people are aware of the past.
Personally I'm inclined to agree with you as I don't care about Apple, I should say, I don't like Apple for many of the same reasons I don't like Sony and have issues with Microsoft. Anti-competitive, litigious, an
Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Public Figure Vs HIPAA, HIPAA Wins! (Score:5, Funny)
Well a double-dumbass on you, sir!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which is worse:
* The First Poster who blows his own post away by failing to quote out of context to confuse readers into thinking he had a point
or
* The guy with mod points that mods said poster up and then posts as AC to clear said mod?
Signed,
The Second Dumbass
Re:So, about that "hormone imbalance"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Tim Cook: Apple's next CEO (Score:3, Informative)
"Plus really, considering that Apple has plans to appoint a new CEO if Jobs dies, they have done all they need to for their shareholders."
Today's Wall Street Journal made the argument that it is in fact more important to hang onto the guy that's been running the shop in Jobs' absence. Tim Cook has now run Apple twice in Jobs' stead, and has impressed both times. Jobs will inevitably retire (or die) sooner rather than later, and there seems to be no doubt that they want to keep the captain's chair for Cook.
Re:So, about that "hormone imbalance"... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Like it or not Jobs is a corporate officer and a large beneficial owner of the company's stock.
If the company was withholding information that is considered material to the value of the business then it should be disclosed. Like it or not, his privacy has limits. He has voluntarily given some of it up in becoming a corporate officer. Failure to disclose can be a huge deal, especially if insiders sold stock during the time when this was not common knowledge.
In the long run it will not be a bunch of fanboys
Enough was disclosed (Score:3, Funny)
e.g. cancer or AIDS or something else as serious as that.
You don't announce a hormonal imbalance that's not serious that way (he couldn't even appear in public!). Well unless he was changing gender (either voluntarily or involuntarily
So if you would sell/buy Apple stock just because Jobs is very sick, you should have done it the day they said "hormonal imbalance".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How long was the wait? (Score:4, Interesting)
Livers are like starfish. You can hack them apart and they regrow. Heck, here is a story about a split liver helping 2 people [wlky.com].
You can also partially remove some from a living person (Lisa?) and give it to someone.
Unlike... kidneys, lungs, hearts, etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is actually a new Apple product (Score:5, Funny)
And when he takes his shirt off you can see the backlit apple logo they installed, which also mysteriously doubled the cost of the operation.
Parent
Re:OT: How to get Slashdot to stop spewing bars (Score:4, Informative)
go to help & preferences, click on classic index - general, and check use classic index.
that got rid of it for me.
Parent
Re:given he conned the transplant system, YES. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, and Apple lied to investors and the world: the man had cancer and a failing organ, and they claimed it was a "hormone imbalance." I hope the SEC is already working on this...
A few things A) You are not entitled to know everything about Steve Jobs B) The shareholders really only need to know that someone will take the place if Jobs dies C) Steve Jobs, or any other CEO could die of any random cause at any time and D) Perhaps thats all that was confirmed at the time? And I'd say that you would probably have a hormone imbalance if you had a failing organ.
Parent
Re:given he conned the transplant system, YES. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh heaven forbid that someone actually uses the money they created to get better faster. Heaven forbid that some people are going to be able to afford things that others cannot. Its the same thing with health care. Because there is not an infinite supply of livers, along with an infinite supply of doctors, its true that some people might not be able to afford a liver transplant. Sure, its sad, but such is life.
Assuming the linked article in GP is true:
Why should someone be given preference on the basis of how much money / power they have? Such an idea is right at home in a country like China, but surely it flies in the face of the idea that "all men are created equal [wikipedia.org]".
I know that in Australia / New Zealand we have a strict national transplant system which means that you can only be on the transplant list for your home state. The system is specifically designed so that "Ethnicity, gender, financial, social, celebrity or political status does not affect the allocation of organs... (and) Organs are given to the person with the greatest medical need who has the best chance of successful transplantation." [transplant.org.au]
The fact is, by using the money you created to buy better drugs or treatment, you are not directly affecting anyone else. With a unique item like an organ, you are depriving someone of a chance at life.
It's a bit like the difference between 'pirating' a movie and 'pirating' a ship off the coast of somalia, in one case no-one is (directly) worse off and in the other, one party forcefully deprives the other of an item.
Anyway, I know where I'd rather get sick. :P
Parent
Re:given he conned the transplant system, YES. (Score:5, Informative)
He could pay for the procedure with cash but people who use insurance get transplants all the time. Further, because of Jobs' socioeconomic status - as a transplant team you'd want to give him an organ because he would be able to maintain it. That can be a huge factor in who gets organs and who doesn't. If someone does not have any family to help take care of them or money to hire nursing help and if that person has questionable self-health care and practices (like they are still drinking alcohol and need a liver transplant), then they probably will not get an organ. Jobs will most likely really take care of his transplant, especially because he can pay for additional help.
In no way did he con the transplant system.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They need to do way instain doner> who spilt thar libres. becaise these bibers cabt fight back it was on the news this mronign a boss in memps who had bight on his liber. They ar had him company for two month and back for new liber. Only just now the talm abiyt it! Probly even deed alraidy!