Interesting piece from ABC News about people trying to find kidney donors via Craigslist. This leapt out however:
And so there you have it: the lack of an open organ market ensures that people die needlessly. Meanwhile in this country the Prime Ministr backs “presumed consent”, insisting that the authorities may claim your organs once you’re dead but denies you the right to profit from their sale while they are still functioning. This must be the wrong way round. Time, as I have mentioned before, to emulate Singapore’s proposal to pay donors for their kidneys. This would save money in the long-run too, given that it costs something in the order of £25,000 a year to treat someone on dialysis. But you need a market to match supply with demand. That’s as true of kidneys as it is anything else.But some families who talked to ABC News say once they find a kidney outside of the traditional organ-donor waiting list system, they have faced hospitals that are suspicious or unprepared to deal with the legal and ethical questions of harvesting an organ from a living person located through personal ads. Only 10 percent of transplant centers will consider doing a kidney transplant from an altruistic live donor who is not related or known by the patient. And only 20-30 percent of transplant centers are willing to perform a so-called “kidney swap” between two families at the hospital who can’t find a blood-type match for their loved ones among their own family, but are well-matched across families.
UPDATE: See this excellent Sally Satel piece in The American for more. Satel knows what she is talking about, having had a kidney transplant herself. The splendid Virginia Postrel was her donor.
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