Sullivan asks: Why Don’t We Resent Steve Jobs’ Wealth? It’s not the wealth, people resent. It’s that wealth, not virtue is the pass/fail deciding factor in life or death situations. Like say, gaming the liver transplant waiting list:

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 15,771 people are currently waiting for a liver in the United States. Last year, 1,481 people died waiting for a donor liver, almost all of which come from the recently deceased. The national average waiting time for a transplant is about a year, but it can average as little as a few months at some centers, organ experts said.

Paschke said UNOS requires transplant centers to encourage patients to do “multiple listings” at transplant centers in multiple geographic areas to increase the odds of being matched to a liver. The only catch, Paschke said, is that health insurance policies often cover only one medical evaluation to get on one transplant center list. Most people simply don’t have the money to pay for multiple extensive evaluations at far-flung locations.

In Arizona, it seems you just don’t even get a chance to get a new liver without 200K in cold hard cash on hand. So yea, I resent the fact that you can work hard all your life, do the right things, be a generally good person and die not because a treatment wasn’t available or experimental and unproven, but because the treatment was way too expensive.