"Human Organs for Sale, Legally, in … Which Country?"

[bicentennial_baby]

This is from a much longer blog entry on the Freakonomics NYT blog, good read though:

"6. Therefore, a movement is afoot to create a market for human organs in the U.S. whereby “donors” would be compensated for their time, trouble, and organ. There are many objections to this market:

a) Some say, for instance, that it would exploit poor people (although poor people are often the ones who need organs, which are currently not available).

b) Others say that such a market would be impossible to properly design and regulate (although this “kidney exchange” program, created by market-design expert Al Roth of Harvard, shows that one problem can have many clever answers). Also, compensation could come in various forms, ranging from cash to tuition to lifetime healthcare.

c) There seems to be a natural repugnance toward buying and selling human organs — illustrated nicely in this presentation by the economist Julio Elias, who has written with Gary Becker on a potential market for organs.

Considering all of these factors, it is hard to imagine that the U.S. will have an organ market any time soon. There is a fervent ongoing debate over our organ shortage, including an actual debate scheduled here.

While there has been some movement toward compensating donors in Israel and in Holland, there is just one country in the world that has apparently gotten rid of its organ shortage by creating a market. Before you read the name of that country in the following paragraph, take a guess. Now guess again, and again — maybe 20 more times.

Benjamin E. Hippen, a transplant nephrologist (and scholar) in North Carolina, recently published a paper called “Organ Sales and Moral Travails: Lessons From the Living Kidney Vendor Program in Iran.”

Yes, Iran."

more here: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/human-organs-for-sale-legally-in-which-country/#more-2523

So....what say you DUers? What are your feelings on the subject? We were discussing this in one of my Econ classes the other day, oddly enough.

:hi:

[Divine Discontent]

1. sell your parts as you wish as long as it's not a necessity to live!

I used to work in the organ transplant field doing a specific function, and knowing what people suffer when they lose the function of an organ, I can understand the desire to spend anything to get a working one. that being said, if it's something you can give up and live, then why not as long as it's regulated.


new Obama items weekly!
www.cafepress.com/warisprofitable

[Donnachaidh]

2. Find or rent a copy of a movie titled "Dirty Pretty Things"

And you'll see what the future is going to be for poor people if they allow organ sales in this country.

Personally, I think the doctors already have themselves a nice little goldmine with organ donation. How much does a hospital charge the sick person for an organ? How much does the doctor receive for implanting it? Doctors and Hospitals won't want to see that income stream peter out, because the donors might actually have to get PAID. :sarcasm:

[gollygee]

3. I am very opposed to this

We create an environment where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We give banks the ability to become predatory in their loaning practices, leading to huge debts for many people. We raise prices of essentials while incomes don't increase as rapidly, if at all. We come up with all these free trade agreements and globalize manufacturing so there aren't enough jobs available for people.

THEN we come up with a few ways for people to make money.

There's a signing bonus to join the military. That's one way we route poor people to sacrifice themselves for wealthy people. Now maybe they can sell off parts of themselves? The problem is only making health- and life-threatening ways available for people to raise themselves out of poverty. If that's all that's available, of COURSE at least some people will choose it. But is it really a choice if it's that or becoming homeless, or feeding your family, etc.? How about getting some manufacturing jobs available in this country again?

It's just an awful, awful idea IMO.

[bicentennial_baby]

4. To be a devil's advocate...

Ok, we create and provide incentives for firms to decrease their pollution of the environment, sometimes by selling permits that actually allow them to pollute, up to a certain threshold. So we're essentially giving them profits in some form in order to get them to do something positive for the common good.

Allowing organ donors to be compensated, in other words to give them greater incentive to donate which would theoretically increase the available supply of organs for transplantation, would also be doing something for the common good, no?

FYI, I don't have a solid opinion of this yet...Just throwing that out there for discussion. :)

[supernova]

5. It makes me queasy

to be honest.

Several points:

it's worth noting that Dr Hippern is in private practice at a for profit hospital in Charlotte. The Cato Insitute published the study.

With that out of the way, even Iranian medical professionals don't really cotton to it either:

Hippen told me,

… don’t dispute the data, but deplore the example. I freely concede (and take pains to highlight) that a crucial moral failing of the Iranian system is that there is insufficient data on the long-term outcomes of organ vendors, and the data that exist suggest that vendors are disproportionately impoverished, which in turn may put them at long-term risk for kidney disease. The Iranian transplant professionals I corresponded with in the course of writing the paper share the concern.

bold is mine.

Funny coincidence, today I was reading a comment at The Guardian about the movie Persepolis.....

The dynamics of class struggle formed a background to the Iranian revolution and are a powerful presence in politics today, but Persepolis fails to address them. Satrapi doesn't seem to realise that the great unwashed who mistreat her friends and family (for example, the window cleaner who becomes a hospital manager) are as motivated by class antagonism as they are by Islamic revolutionary ideology.

On the surface, it might appear that the window cleaner is as driven by doctrine as are the ugly, brutish women from deprived neighbourhoods in the south of Tehran who roam the parks and streets of north Tehran on semi-official tours of duty, harassing and bullying the manicured, surgically enhanced, Gucci-clad dog walkers. But class antagonism and resentment is bubbling away underneath. Cosmo Landesman is way off the mark (if tediously predictable) in his review in the Sunday Times: "You wonder if the casual misogyny displayed by so many men is at the root of the Iranian revolution." Er, not really, Cosmo.

In Iran, as elsewhere, the gap between the rich and poor is growing ever wider. I am frequently astonished at the liberal elite's {I think he means Iran's "liberal elites} total lack of consciousness of this great chasm that divides society. They think nothing, for example, of importing pedigree dogs (a subtle badge of opposition to Islam). On a recent visit, a relative told me with great pride about the facilities at the four-star kennel that is looking after her dogs in her absence.

Though the revolution allowed certain members of the former proletariat to take over the assets of the Shah's close associates, there was no structural redistribution of wealth. It is possible that that former window cleaner is by now the managing director of a big conglomerate. An opportunist middle manager might have grown a beard and discarded his necktie for advancement, or a merchant in the bazaar may have used his contacts at the mosque to secure a government contract. Corruption is there, as it was before: it just changed its uniform during the revolution.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/masoud_golsorkhi/2008/04/a_partial_history.html

So, you've got a situation in Iran that is really no different economically that it was in the Shah's time (which prompted the revolution in the first place.), according to this writer. But now it has an overly of religious fundamentalism that only allows small individual choices. If you're wealthy, you import pedigreed dogs apparently. If you are poor, you sell your kidneys at a state-sanctioned rate. Is there anybody at DU who is Iranian and can add more information on this subject?

I'm not seeing how this could be a good thing at all. *shudder*

[bicentennial_baby]

6. Very good points!!

:hi:

You make a sound argument.

I'm just a geek for thinking about creating markets where none exist, theoretically. Or, recognizing markets that aren't generally recognized as such. Nerd alert!

:pals: