Opinion: A single reform that could save 100,000 lives immediately (via latimesopinion )
About half the U.S. population, including 18 million Californians, are registered organ donors. But whether you can actually donate organs depends on how you die, among other limiting factors.
Increasing transplants is the solution to save lives. And every transplanted patient taken off dialysis saves society more than $1.6 million, according to apublished in the medical journal Value in Health. When people acknowledge the kidney shortage, they may think, “I’m a registered organ donor. I’m doing my part.” Unfortunately, there’s a limit to deceased donation — the numbers don’t work. To be a deceased organ donor, you have to die in a very rare manner .
We’ve run out of options. The supply is nowhere near the demand for kidneys, and the gap is widening. Why not pay people to donate a kidney? The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits compensating kidney donors, which is strange in that in American society, it’s common to pay for plasma, bone marrow, hair, sperm, eggs and even surrogate pregnancies. We already pay to create and sustain life.: “Every person in the chain of living organ donation, except one, profits.” The hospital gets paid, the doctors and nurses and staff get paid, the pharmaceutical industry gets paid and the recipient is the main beneficiary.
The ethical concerns regarding compensation are straightforward. Nobody wants to coerce or compel those in desperate financial straits to do something they would not have done otherwise. The challenge, then — until artificial or nonhuman animal substitutes are viable options — is to devise a compensation model that doesn’t exploit donors.
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