Instead of kidney waitlists that kill thousands of people a year, let people get paid for kidney transplants.
About 4,000 people in America die every year while waiting for kidney transplants. More than 95,000 currently need regular dialysis to stay alive while waiting for transplants. The average person who needs a kidney must endure the discomfort and restrictions of dialysis for three to five years during the wait.
Most countries have organ-donation systems like America's—and long waitlists. Iran, by contrast, legalized payment to kidney donors in 1988; within 11 years the country eliminated its waitlist. Payment compensates donors for their time, pain, and risk; it also increases the supply of willing donors.
People often object to paying donors on the grounds that it is wrong to commodify the human body. Compensation, they say, would reduce a person from a human being with dignity and inherent worth to a vending machine of fluids, tissues, and organs. This argument does not hold up.
...read more at reason.com
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Partly it's people reacting to the ugliness of the rich simply buying organs from the poor. But it's an aesthetic reaction to an otherwise mutually beneficial relationship.
One might wonder if these are exploitative transactions, and thus morally worthy of a ban, just as exploitative usury was banned in the Bible.
I would personally say that the transactions themselves shouldn't be banned, but that in an ideal society no one feel coerced into it, i.e. "I don't want to lose my kidney, but this is the only way to feed my family"
Thomas Sowell said something to the effect of “You aren’t helping the poor by taking away the opportunities they rely on.”
I think I quoted Thomas Sowell in class and a student in their essay said something along the lines of "Thomas Sowell is one of the Chicago Boys, they're part of the problem."
I wonder what youtubers that guy is watching.
Who’s teaching students to write like that?
Not me
Why is the person giving up the kidney the only one not getting paid?
The doctors get paid to remove and implant it. The hospital gets paid. The nurses get paid. Someone gets paid to transport it.
Because labor theory of value is heavily reflected in medical community (and elsewhere)
Once asked a doctor: if there's a shortage of primary care physicians, why not pay them more? Answer: because they didn't get as much training as the specialists so they don't deserve higher pay.
me like.
YEEESSS!
The interesting question isn't just “should kidneys be legal to sell?” It's whether a regulated market could increase supply without turning poverty into the main source of donors.