I first wrote about allowing markets for body parts back in 2009 and 2010.
Let’s revisit that issue today, starting with John Stossel’s case for legal organ sales in a video for Reason.
This should be a slam-dunk issue.
- I want drugs to be legal, even though I personally disapprove of drug use.
- I want prostitution to be legal, even though I’ve never swapped sex for money (no matter what women offer me).
- I want gambling to be legal, even though I find that activity to be very boring.
- I want alcohol to be legal, even though I generally find booze to be distasteful.
So it should go without saying that I want organ sales to be legal. Indeed, the case for legalizing organ sales is far stronger because I can’t think of a legitimate argument against a policy that creates no downsides for third parties and unambiguously benefits both sides (sick people and organ donors) of the transaction.
Professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University’s law school has been a long-time advocate of saving lives with organ sales.
Here’s some of what he wrote in 2019 for Reason.
Many Americans die every year because they need kidney transplants, but cannot find one in time, in large part due to federal laws banning organ sales. A recently published article finds that the number of such deaths is likely to be much greater than previous estimates indicate. It finds that over the 30 years between 1988 and 2017, an average of over 30,000 Americans have died each year, because the ban on organ sales prevented them from getting transplants in time. …even if the true figure is only, say, half as high, it still represents a vast amount of unnecessary suffering that could largely be prevented simply by allowing financial compensation for organ donors, thereby increasing the supply of available kidneys to the point where it can meet the demand.
Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, Sally Satel has a very personal interest in encouraging organ sales.
…there have never been enough kidneys, livers, hearts, and other organs. Kidneys, the organ most in need and most easily donated by the living, can be given by living friends and relatives and even the occasional “good Samaritan donor.” But, by law, they must be given for free, in the spirit of “altruism.” Altruism is a beautiful sentiment, and I have personally benefited: two magnificent friends have donated kidneys to me; one in 2006 and then again in 2016. Thousands others in the U.S., where I live, and elsewhere around the world, are not so lucky – they die waiting. …Compensating donors as a way to recruit people who would like to be rewarded for saving the life of another is long overdue. …Objections…ring hollow. The most common is that compensation “commodifies the body.” We already commodify the body, speaking strictly, every time there is a transplant: The doctors get paid to manipulate the body. So does the hospital. Why, then, object to enriching the donor — the sole individual in this entire scenario who gives the precious item in question and assumes all the risk?
In an article for CapX, Sam Dumitriu and Samuel Hammond make the case for pro-market reforms in the United Kingdom.
…increasing the number of living donors is becoming a major imperative for healthcare systems worldwide. For better or worse, altruism alone won’t fill the gap. Britain needs to change the law to give organ donors, particularly kidney donors, a financial incentive to donate. Rewards for donors are currently illegal… While the average time patients spend on the kidney waiting list has declined, it still routinely takes over three years before a match is found. In contrast, it’s clear from markets where financial rewards for donors are permitted that they are effective at increasing supply. …Kidney donors not only save lives and allow patients to come off dialysis, they also save the NHS money. According to the National Kidney Federation, each kidney transplant saves the NHS over £200,000 by reducing the need for expensive dialysis treatment. That’s significantly more than $40,000 price the Nobel Laureate Gary Becker and his co-author Julio Elias estimated would be necessary to eliminate the kidney shortage altogether.
In a column for the Federalist, Liz Wolfe makes the case that she should be allowed to help others by selling a kidney.
Four thousand dollars is my price, I think. … But I can’t do any of this because the government says it’s wrong. You know what else is wrong? Having 43,000 people die annually due to the current kidney shortage in our country. I’d love to help, but I don’t currently have a huge incentive to do so. …kidney-selling should be a person’s choice to make. …the naysayer might argue, isn’t autonomy undermined by desperation? Can consent truly take place if someone is debating between a set of imperfect options—selling an organ and profiting handsomely versus starving to death? …That would be more compelling if we didn’t already allow poor people to work in horribly dangerous industries for money. …Commercial fishing has a very high mortality rate and relatively low median wages. Roofers, garbage collectors (and recyclables collectors), construction workers, iron and steel workers, electricians, and truck drivers all have high mortality rates as well. Government does not intervene to protect these people from working in these industries… Either desperation undermines autonomy and invalidates consent or it doesn’t, but we should be more consistent. …Since we’re failing at pure altruism, maybe it’s time we turn to cold, hard cash as a better way to save lives.
In a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, Hans Bader looks specifically at kidney transplants.
Kidney failure shouldn’t be a death sentence. But for thousands of people, it is, thanks to federal laws banning organ sales. Those laws radically shrink the supply of kidneys and other organs that people desperately need to stay alive. …a recent study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, titled “The Terrible Toll of the Kidney Shortage”…notes that the “106,000” people “who do not receive a transplant” due to the current kidney shortage “are fated to live an average of 5 years on dialysis therapy before dying prematurely.” …kidney donor Alexander Berger…predicted that allowing kidney donors to be compensated would save countless lives by giving people an incentive to donate their kidneys, resulting in a vast increase in kidney donations. …the taxpayers would save money, too. The government would be able to simply pay for kidney transplants for poor and elderly people…rather than paying for years and years of costly dialysis treatment through Medicare and Medicaid.
The bottom line is that paying donors would be good for sick people and good for taxpayers (Medicaid and Medicare are two of the most burdensome programs in the budget).
Sadly, politicians are standing in the way. But one potential seller has launched a court case.
John Bellocchio is suing the federal government to gain the freedom to sell his organs, as reported in the New York Post by Priscilla DeGregory.
A New Jersey man is suing the federal government for the right to sell his own organs — challenging a US law that bans the practice, new court papers show. John Bellocchio, 37, of Oakland filed the suit against United States Attorney General Merrick Garland in Manhattan federal court Thursday. He says in the suit that he struggled financially and looked into offloading some of his organs — perhaps a kidney — only to find out it’s illegal to make a buck on your body parts. Bellocchio, a career academic who now owns a business that helps connect people with service dogs, argues that the law contravenes his constitutional right to freedom of contract in determining what can be done with his own personal property — or, more specifically, his own body.
Christian Britschgi wrote about this legal challenge for Reason, but also made lots of strong arguments for why organ sales should be legal.
…the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA)…makes it a crime for anyone to “acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce.” Violators of this ban face a maximum fine of $50,000 and up to five years in prison. That prohibition has left the 90,000 patients in need of a kidney on the national transplant list…it’s estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people die for want of a kidney transplant each year. Many more are left to undergo expensive, draining dialysis treatment. Medicare, which covers kidney patients of all ages, spent $81 billion on patients with chronic kidney disease in 2018. Medicare-related spending on patients with end-stage renal disease totaled $49.2 billion that same year.
As you probably figured out, most of the opposition to organ sales is from people who inexplicably feel squeamish or uncomfortable with the notion of using money to save lives.
But you know what’s even more important for life than a kidney? Food.
Yet that doesn’t stop us from utilizing private farms, private food processors, and private grocery stores in order to get lots of food at very cheap prices.
And even the limited intervention in this sector (farm subsidies and food stamps, for instance) have nothing to do with qualms about private provision of food.
So let’s be rational and humane by allowing markets for organ sales.
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Image credit: CMSRC | CC BY-SA 3.0.
