As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-transplant care performed in China.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little has signed legislation into law aiming to ensure that residents are not unknowingly complicit in the Chinese regime’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-transplant care performed in China or any country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting. The
legislation, which was
passed unanimously by the state Senate and House earlier this month, was
signed by Mr. Little on April 10.
The new law will also ban medical and research facilities in Idaho from using genetic sequencing machines or software that come from foreign adversaries such as China’s communist regime.
Idaho is not the first state to take up the issue. Texas was the
first state to enact such a law, and Utah was the second. Texas’s law went into effect on Sept. 1, 2023, and
Utah’s law will come into force on May 1.
For more than a decade, China has been a top destination for medical tourists who seek organ transplants, as Chinese hospitals have consistently offered short waiting times for matching organs—significantly shorter than in developed nations with public organ donation programs.
The reason that Chinese hospitals can offer organs on demand to paying clients is because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built up a living organ bank. In 2019, the independent
China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of human organs.
Falun Gong, also known as
Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice introduced to the Chinese public in 1992 that encourages its adherents to live by the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By 1999, 70 million to 100 million people had taken up the practice, according to official estimates at the time.
The CCP, fearing Falun Gong’s popularity, launched a brutal campaign in July 1999 to eliminate the practice. For more than 24 years, millions of practitioners have been illegally detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated,
according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
In 2023, there were 209 new reported cases of Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted to death, according to a
report from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that tracks the persecution in China. The report included the case of 30-year-old radio show host
Pang Xun, who was allegedly beaten to death in December 2022 while in prison.
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), a Washington-based nonprofit
nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, stated that Beijing has deliberately concealed information about its transplant industry, according to its
2023 report.
“The lack of transparency and traceability is part of China’s strategy to cover up and conceal,” the report reads.
“It is difficult to assess the actual number of Falun Gong adherents who have been killed in detention. According to some estimates, 50,000 to 100,000 members are being killed for their organs per year; although this number appears unfathomable, the actual number may be even larger.”
The DAFOH report also includes several accounts from family members of victims of forced organ harvesting, including
Jiang Li and
Han Yu.
There have been efforts in Congress to address the CCP’s forced organ harvesting.
In March 2023, the House
passed a landmark bill (H.R. 1154) that would sanction anyone involved in forced organ harvesting and require annual government reporting on such activities taking place in foreign countries. The
Senate version of the legislation (
S.761) has not advanced out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since it was introduced in 2023.
Levi Browde, executive director of the Falun Dafa Information Center,
took to X, formerly known as Twitter, in March to urge the Senate to take up the legislation.
“One year ago, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act, H.R.1154, was referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations after passing the House,” Mr. Browde wrote, tagging Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and James Risch (R-Idaho), the top Democrat and Republican of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Let’s keep pushing for action against forced organ harvesting.”
