Today, around 20,000 kidneys are transplanted every year.

And based on estimates from one report, those transplants cost a total of more than $8 billion, and that's just for kidneys.

Factor in the 15,000 other organs transplanted each year, and you've got yourself a booming business.

Hospitals are in the business of saving lives.

Keyword here being "business,"

and organ transplants, well, they're a pretty great way to add to your bottom line.

Transplant centers are a

good revenue center for hospitals. There are some

departments in hospitals that don't make a lot of money.

That's absolutely true.

I'd be lying if I said, "Nah." It's true,

and then there's other departments in hospitals

including transplant that do tend to, yeah, be profitable for hospitals, absolutely.

According to a report

published by the consulting firm Milliman,

the average billed cost for a heart transplant

before insurance is an estimated $1.38 million,

and other organs, well, they're not much cheaper.

Around half of those costs come from what's called hospital transplant admission.

That includes room and board in the hospital

along with things like nursing care

and medication during your stay.

Now, for a heart transplant, which might require

something like two weeks of inpatient care,

hospital transplant admission adds up

to an average of nearly $900,000 a transplant.

Some doctors say these prices are so high

in part because the hospital's trying to make money.

Here's the dichotomy between

hospital interests and our interests as doctors and patient advocates.

That's Dr. Preben Brandenhoff.

He's a surgeon who specializes in heart and lung transplants.

The hospital, they just want to make money to run the hospital.

If you want to be really stone-cold,

they're not into taking care of patients.

But Dr. Brandenhoff says there's a reason

why transplants are so much more expensive than other procedures.

Take heart bypass surgery for example.

It can cost up to $130,000,

but that's just a fraction of the cost of a heart transplant.

To understand why, just consider what it takes to transplant an organ.

If the organ donor is deceased,

there's the expensive medication

to keep the organs healthy,

then there's the charted flights

to get the organs where they need to go.

If it is one of these

where I go to Hawaii and get the lungs

because from the time I have the lungs out

and ready to go, it'll be five hours going back to the mainland.

And then there's all the trained personnel.

So you may have 10 surgeons

in an operating room working, so it's huge.

And each of those surgeons is making a lot of money.

According to Salary.com, the average base salary

for a heart transplant surgeon is

over $600,000 a year compared to, say, a trauma surgeon who makes under $400,000 a year.

And finally, there's even more expensive medication

to help the body accept the new organ.

It can cost somebody a couple thousand dollars

a month if they don't have insurance.

So by the time it's all tallied up,

a seven-figure transplant isn't all that surprising,

even though the organ might come for free.

And when you consider what you get for it,

you know, life, it might even be a pretty good deal.