People already legally sell blood, plasma, and bone marrow. Why not a kidney?
Have you volunteered to be an organ donor? I did.
I just clicked the box on the government form that asks if, once I die, I'm willing to donate my organs to someone who needs them.
Why not? Lots of people need kidneys, livers, etc. When I'm dead, I sure won't need mine.
Still, there are not enough donors. So, more than 100,000 Americans are on a waiting list for kidneys. Taking care of them is so expensive, it consumes almost 3 percent of the federal budget!
So why not allow Americans to sell an organ?
People already legally sell blood, plasma, sperm, eggs, and bone marrow. Why not a kidney? People have two. We can live a full life with just one.
If the U.S. allowed people to sell, the waiting list for kidneys would soon disappear.
"Poor people are going to be hurt," replies philosophy professor Samuel Kerstein in my latest video. Kerstein advised the World Health Organization, which supports the near universal laws that ban selling organs.
"Body parts to be put into Americans will come from poor countries," warns Kerstein. "I don't want to see poor people in Pakistan having their lives truncated."
What arrogance.
People have free will. Poor people are just as capable of deciding what's best for them as rich people. Who are you, I asked Kerstein, to tell people they may not?
"We are people who care about people who are different from us," he replied, "and poorer than we are. That's why we care."
These are "vacuous moralisms," replies Lloyd Cohen, an attorney who's long argued against the ban on organ-selling.
"Transplant surgeons make money. Transplant physicians make money. Hospitals, drug companies make money," he points out. "Everybody can get paid except the person delivering the irreplaceable part!"
He's right, of course, except that today some donors do get paid. Whenever foolish governments ban things that many people want, black markets appear.
Some people go overseas and buy organs from shady middlemen. Some make secret deals in America.
The process would be much safer, and prices lower, if buying and selling were legal.
"Financial incentives work for everything!" says Cohen. "They work for food; they work for housing; they work for clothing!"
He calls the warnings that "the weak and poor will be exploited" paternalistic.
"We heard the same argument with surrogacy," he points out. "Then you interview the women. (They say) this is a wonderful thing that they can do. And they get paid!"
Oddly, the one country that allows the selling of organs is Iran. The government buys organs from people willing to sell. I don't trust statistics from Iran, but a PBS report claims legalization has dramatically reduced the waiting time for a kidney.
Twenty-four years ago, Cohen went on 60 Minutes to argue for legalization of organ sales. At the time, he joined the debate simply because he strongly felt the ban was unjust. But now Cohen has learned that his own kidneys are failing. He needs a transplant.
He won't break the law and turn to the black market. He hopes to get a kidney though a group called MatchingDonors that pairs altruistic volunteers with people who need organs. Remarkably, a woman volunteered to give Cohen one of her kidneys. She's now being tested to see if she is a match for him.
If not, Cohen will be back on the waiting list with 102,914 other Americans. Most will die, waiting.
"Organs that could restore people to health and extend life are instead being buried and burned," sighs Cohen.
All because timid governments would rather suppress commerce than give patients a market-based new shot at life.
"Transplant surgeons make money. Transplant physicians make money. Hospitals, drug companies make money," he points out. "Everybody can get paid except the person delivering the irreplaceable part!"
They won't even allow payment to cover funeral expenses.
Obviously, the organs are totally worthless. Or the donor (or their family) could be paid, just like the surgeons and nurses and all the middlemen.
In the case of kidneys, we only need one to live. So you might have to consider kidneys to be a special case as many kidney donors are not dead or in a coma and brain-dead. I tend to think that you could improve organ donation rates quite a bit by allowing payments to cover funeral costs. I'm not so sure you would want to let a college kid auction off his extra kidney for quick cash to cover college loans or pay for a new car.
Obviously, there needs to be some restrictions. I agree that getting a few thousand bucks to buy a new car would not qualify.
Exactly. You wouldn't allow it for trivial purchases and you would have to limit the reimbursement so you didn't give people a serious financial incentive to terminate their injured or dying relatives.
Apparently, kidneys fetch about $262,000 each on the black market.
Woh. I had no idea but I don't doubt you. There are a lot of rich people out there around the world.
As far as selling your own liver, since that organ has the capacity to regenerate, you could sell half of it.
I agree entirely. And there should be no restrictions on sales of tissue that can regenerate. In addition, such donors should automatically move to the head of the list if they themselves require a similar transplant. Reward the donors in that way. So if someone donates a healthy kidney out of generosity, they should move to the head of the donor list if their remaining kidney does fail them in later years.
This way there would be no incentive for the poor.
The poor don't pay enough taxes that it would amount to an incentive unless it's just a tax credit that will result in a refund.
Adding government into the mix may not improve the situation or prevent abuse of the system.
I also think we should simply eliminate the option for any family member to donate a child's organs or the organ of any person under their guardianship. I think that organ donations should require positive prior advance permission to harvest organs, perhaps as part of a living will legal document. No one should be allowed to donate another person's organs at all. Convince them while they're still alive and healthy to be a donor and/or pay them for it. At the very least, any sales of organs could not go to the family but would have to apply to the donor's final expenses and estate (but none of that money could flow from the estate to the person who made the decision to make the donation). IOW, you couldn't get anything more than the funeral costs out of donating someone else's organs. And you would then be excluded from receiving any "profits" from the sale of organs.
Even a system like that would not be bullet-proof but you could greatly increase organ donations and curb the worst incentives for the worst people to try to profit from donating the organs of those over whom they are legal guardians.
