A Market For Organs

[acesfull86]

One of Milei’s positions that hasn’t gotten too much attention (other than as a throwaway line meant to convey how “extreme” his is) is his opinion that there should be a legal market allowing people to sell their organs. He clearly has his work cut out for him trying to fix Argentina’s woeful economy, so I’d imagine this is a lower priority issue that maybe gets left on the cutting room floor. But I’d love to see it tried.

There’s a persistent gap in our country (and around the world) between supply and demand of life-saving organs. America already allows people to donate organs out of the goodness of their hearts - why not incentivize more people to do so via compensation?

This doesn’t have to be a Wild West free market where anything goes. Even a highly regulated, government run market that offends all of my capitalist sensibilities has the potential to be a huge improvement over a pretty terrible status quo.

[acesfull86]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/o...sultPosition=1

There are 100,000 people in the United States waiting for a kidney. More than half a million are on dialysis, which from my experience I know to be more of a means of survival than a form of living. About 4,000 people die each year while waiting for a kidney. Another 4,000 become too sick to undergo surgery — a gentler way of saying that they, too, die. The National Kidney Foundation estimates that without more investment in preventing diabetes and other ailments, more than one million people will be suffering from kidney failure by 2030, up from over 800,000 now.

These numbers illuminate a story of largely preventable suffering. Hundreds of millions of healthy people walk the streets quietly carrying two kidneys. They need only one. The head-scratcher is how to get kidneys from the people who have one to spare into the people who need one. Getting them from genetically modified pigs, as was recently found possible, won’t be a widespread solution for a very long time.

There’s a simpler and long overdue answer: Pay people for their kidneys.