A legal market for organs is the way forward. This is an effective solution to the shortage of organs needed for transplants and will help to solve the problem of trafficking in human beings. By legalizing the sale of organs, you can help protect the most vulnerable who continue to sell their organs (legal or illegal). Governments can protect potential donors with entities that perform the same functions as the current organ registry and exclude the procurement of organs. Inaction comes at a price. For far too many people on a waiting list, these costs are pain and suffering – or the loss of a loved one. There is a solution that can be tried. We need to throw overboard the ideologues who reject organ sales because they have a price and recognize that it is worth having a possible backlash to save a life. There is no doubt that a government-funded health care system can afford the prohibitive cost of buying organs. A single kidney is believed to have a black market price of $20,000.
Therefore, the sale of organs will tolerate the most blatant discrimination between rich and poor. The possibility for those who cannot afford to buy a donated organ is eliminated. What family, if prepared to donate a parent`s organs, would choose to refuse a voluntary payment of tens of thousands of pounds? There will be no two-tier market of selling and giving. Donations will disappear and only the rich will survive. The sale of organs is a bad solution to an urgent problem. The BMA has proposed a system of “deemed consent”. This system would allow physicians to assume that a deceased patient`s organs can be used for transplants, unless the patient or his or her family has requested it. As an alternative, the BMA has called for a radical overhaul of the inefficient system of matching patients with donors. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed the development of a website that connects patients, surgeons and donors nationwide. The BMA is also considering the use of “multiple organ harvesting teams” led by hospital consultants to ensure that available organs from cadaver donors are not lost. The organ donor or their family will benefit significantly from the sale.
Even the poorest person will not choose to donate their heart or lungs and die like this. A surgeon would also not be willing to perform such an operation. Nevertheless, a kidney and a piece of liver can be removed without significant impairment. It is patronizing to consider that individuals cannot make a reasoned decision to donate or sell these organs. The family of a recently deceased relative should also be able to save someone else`s life while receiving compensation. Although organ transplantation has become a vital wonder of modern medicine, the waiting list for donors is much longer than care, and many patients die before they can be treated. Therefore, proponents argue that creating an economic incentive for organ donation will save lives. Others, however, argue that allowing the sale of harvested organs would reduce equal access between rich and poor and encourage illegal organ trafficking in developing countries. Should the market for human organs be legalised? Those who preferred to buy and sell organs rose from 44% to 60%.
But the opponents only improved by 4 points, from 27 to 31%. Should you have the right to sell your organs at a profit? However, systems like the U.S. and similar systems like the U.K. are not the only viable options. While these are the most globally accepted ways to meet the demand for organs, they are not the only ones; Iran has its own method of dealing with demand. Beginning in 1988, Iran launched a program to compensate donors for organ donation, eliminating the waiting list for kidney transplants. Under the current system, buyers and sellers can buy and sell kidneys at a fixed price of $4,600. Although parallel exploitation agreements have been concluded outside the state-regulated system, Iran has been able to avoid many of the ethical problems that often arise from the sale of organs. For example, one study found that while the majority of kidneys sold in Iran came from people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, everyone, rich or poor, could have equal access to kidney transplants thanks to funding from nonprofits. As mentioned earlier, a financially desperate person who donates organs often leads to poor health outcomes, making that person even more economically unstable. However, in the Iranian system, donors enjoy health insurance for at least one year after surgery and reduced coverage for an additional period after the end of this coverage. Although the system is not perfect, it allows those who need kidneys to access it relatively easily and reduces the exploitation of the poor that prevails in countries such as Pakistan and the Philippines.
It is estimated that if the U.S. established a similar legal market for the sale of kidneys and paid donors $45,000, it would not only eliminate the waiting list for kidneys, but would also save taxpayers $12 billion a year. Essentially, the pros and cons of advocating for a legal organ market are difficult to assess. Monetary rewards for organs cause problems where the poor are disadvantaged. Yet paying donors is an easy way to dramatically increase organ reserves, potentially saving thousands of lives each year. In both cases, there will be ethical dilemmas. However, it is clear that if the U.S. wants to abolish the current waiting list, something has to change.
