2025 Legislative Education Event Resource Center

Donate Life NYS
2025 Legislative Education Event
Tuesday April 8, 2025
Legislative Office Building, Room 711 A/B
9:00 am until 4:30 pm

Thank you for joining us for our annual Legislative Education event, when we educate lawmakers about important donation-relevant legislation being advanced in 2025.

Legislative Education Event Agenda

Registration: 9:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m. – Pick up materials, name tags, & lunches in Legislative Office Building (LOB) Room 711 A/B

9:45 a.m.– Quick review of logistics and event

10:00 a.m. – Depart for group photo and press conference in “The Well” of the LOB

10:15 a.m. – Group photo

10:30 a.m. – Donate Life Month press conference

11:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Team-based meetings with legislators

Donate Life Month Press Conference

As part of our day’s program, we’re delighted to once again host a special press event and celebration at 10:30 a.m. Join us as Donate Life NYS partners with Assembly Majority Leader Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes and Assemblyman Philip A. Palmesano. Special guest DMV Commissioner Mark J. Schroeder will also be in attendance.

Legislative Education Event Resources

Legislative Agenda

This year, we will be advocating for the passage of three pieces of legislation:

1. SFY 2025-26 State Budget Request
   Donate Life New York State (NYS) urges the Legislature to restore $1 million in funding in the Aid to Localities in the final enacted State budget to sustain critical programs to increase organ, eye, and tissue donation and transplant statewide. This funding request maintains last year’s appropriation, ensuring that we continue building upon the progress already achieved.
   
2. The HEART Act (Helping Equal Access to Registration for Transplant)
   
   Since 1990, New York has prohibited organ transplant candidates from listing at multiple transplant centers, disproportionately impacting low-income, Medicaid, and underinsured individuals who face financial barriers to listing out-of-state. Medicaid coverage generally does not permit non-emergency care outside New York, creating unequal access to lifesaving transplants. Medicaid patients represent 27% of transplant waitlist candidates but only 15% of recipients, compared to privately insured patients who account for 35% of candidates and 37% of recipients. This ban also conflicts with national Organ Procurement Transplantation Network (OPTN) standards, which encourage multi-listing and promote transparency and patient autonomy.
   
3. Doorways to Donation Act of 2025: Personal Income Taxes
   
   In 2010, New York became the first state in the nation to pass legislation incorporating the opportunity to enroll in the Donate Life Registry into its voter registration application. Since then, Donate Life New York State and the legislature have continued to collaborated, pioneering numerous new and convenient opportunities for our residents to enroll as organ, eye, and tissue donors. These innovative ‘Doorways to Donation’ have generated over 1.2 million registrations to date.
   
   
   
   To build on this progress, we urge the legislature to pass the Doorways to Donation Act of 2025 (A.7011-Tapia/S.TBD), which will provide New Yorkers with another convenient, secure opportunity to document their decision to be an organ and tissue donor when filing their personal income taxes. The enrollment system mirrors secure state interactions—only minimal personal data is collected, with no financial details exchanged—thus safeguarding privacy while facilitating donor registration.
   
4. Amend the New York Gift Act

In 2019, the legislature modernized the state’s anatomical gift law through its passage of the New York Gift Act. Prior to this policy change, New York’s anatomical gift law consisted primarily of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act’s 1987 provisions. In instances when a deceased individual has not documented their decision to make an anatomical gift, provisions contained within the New York Gift Act created a more inclusionary prioritized list of those who may authorize an anatomical gift on behalf of the decedent. This amendment aligns New York’s donation decision-makers with those of forty-three other states.

The current legislation proposes to further expand that list and bring it into alignment with the rest of the nation by including an additional authorizer to this hierarchy of decision-makers: close friend.

New York is one of only seven states that do not include close friends in the classes of persons authorized to make an anatomical gift. The anatomical gift laws of forty-three other states as well as that of Washington D.C. contain language allowing a close friend or equivalent to make this decision.