Names You Need To Know: Organ FuturesBy SUSAN ADAMS
KIdney
87,000 Americans are waiting for these.
The idea of a futures market for human organs could gain ground soon. Notes Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an activist in the battle to remedy the nation’s severe organ shortage, “Increasingly, polls are showing that both transplant surgeons and the public are open to experimenting with rewarding donors.” The first step toward incentivizing donors could come in the form of contracts for cadaver organs, she predicts.
Right now, 87,000 Americans are on the kidney transplant wait list; within the year, at least 4,000 will die. Satel herself went through a harrowing 18-month wait for a donor organ after she was diagnosed with kidney disease in 2004.
Cadaver organ contracts are the brainchild of George Mason University economist and law professor Lloyd Cohen. Buying and selling human organs is against the law in this country, whether from live or dead bodies. Cohen believes this must change. His concise argument: “If you pay people for something, they will provide more of it.”
Cohen’s proposal to allow people to contract to sell their organs after they die, neatly gets around the main objection to legalizing the sale of organs: that poor people would be tempted to cut themselves open for cash. Like life insurance, the money would go to their heirs or a designated charity. Kidneys could sell for $5,000, he speculates. Lungs, possibly $35,000.
Full disclosure: Satel is both a source and friend, and a writer I have edited and published in Forbes. She’s masterful at expressing her views. My personal favorite piece by Sally is this moving, dramatic 2007 feature in the New York Times Magazine, about her own personal ordeal, “Desperately Seeking A Kidney.”
I also recommend this provocative piece by Lloyd Cohen, in the fall 2005 issue of Regulation magazine.
