Last year more than 6,500 people died waiting for organ transplants. Retired insurance salesman David Undis thinks the solution is to create a club of donors [link fixed—MF] that agree to make their organs available when they die on the condition that other club members get first dibs on those organs. So says Julian Sanchez in the Reason article, “Whose Organs Are They, Anyway?”
Predictably, the American medical establishment is steadfastly opposed to the concept.
The National Organ Transplant Act, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1984, established a network to maintain a national registry for transplant organ matching. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) maintains the national waiting list for transplantable organs in the U.S. UNOS performs this service as a nonprofit under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.
The National Organ Transplant Act also specifically forbids the sale of organs. Undis tells Sanchez that the reason for the critical organ shortage is because “the government has set the market price for organs to zero.” Well, of course. That’s it. Let the free marketeers establish a market for transplant organs and everything will be hunky dory. How could we have been so stupid as to think health care should be immune to the forces of the free market.
Truth be told, had my kidneys failed 30 years ago instead of 3, I would have died within months of diagnosis. Back then, hospital death squads determined which patients would be given dialysis and which would be sent on their not-so-merry way with a bag of morphine to ease the convulsions that preceded a particularly grisly death. There are many serious issues—including ethical and economic concerns—revolving around organ transplantation. The role of the free market isn’t one of them.
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