Posted on 12/11/2002 6:26:48 PM PST by Sir Gawain
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Most Americans would say that they own their own internal organs. Of course, most Americans would say that they own their houses, when actually American houses are co-owned by banks and property tax authorities. So, as usual, we can't find the truth by taking a vote. This shouldn't surprise us; if you try to solve any physics, biology, or political problem by taking a mass popular vote you won't get reasonable answers either. So who really owns your heart, baby? One obvious way of determining ownership of a thing is to find out whom you must pay to buy it. So, if you need replacement internal organs (as so many of us do), whom must you pay for them? The answer, as we all know, is: everyone but the person they come from. The transplant doctor, the organlegger, the circulatory technician; all of these essential people get paid when you buy a heart or kidney. Only the donor gets nothing. So, then, if you really need an organ in short supply, you pay the doctor more, right? Wrong. If you need an organ that's not available, you die. In the US, organs are allocated by a board that spends its time deciding how to distribute them "fairly". Since there are no market signals (prices) to guide the board, it distributes organs semi-randomly, with no reference to willingness of the patient to pay, the transplant success rate of the receiving hospital, or anything else tied to the crassness of mere reality. Transplant doctors are constantly (and correctly) bemoaning the shortage of transplant organs. Millions have been spent by public health bureaucracies for commercials to harass people into donating their organs. But since the incentives to the donors remain the same (nada; in some areas you actually have to pay a fee to provide your priceless life-giving organs), organs remain in short supply. Canada's health commissars have gone so far as to use 70-year-old livers for transplant (yes, that's just as stupid as it sounds; those cells' telomeres aren't getting any longer). The shortage is actually far worse than it appears. Every human cell has a little IFF (identification, friend or foe) device called an MHC protein. The MHC proteins are highly variable between individuals; there are typically seven different allele loci and over 100 variants of each allele. So the odds of getting an exact match between two random donors are very poor. MHC proteins that don't match cause transplant rejection, which can only be suppressed by suppressing the whole immune system with anti-rejection drugs. However, with over six billion people on this planet, your perfect-match kidney or heart is probably out there somewhere. If all potential donors signed and were in a database, there would be a lot of good MHC matches. MHC-matched organs would make transplant therapy much more practical. Let's not forget that you don't have to be dead to donate a lot of things, either; bone marrow cells, even one kidney. Transplant medicine hasn't realized one percent of its potential, purely because of the donor shortage. Every single reader of this site knows the solution, of course. Simply paying the donor for their organs would solve the majority of the organ shortage overnight. Many people in the Third World could feed their families for a lifetime on the price that Bill Gates would be willing to pay for a perfect-MHC-match kidney. Even in the US, people who could expect a few thousand dollars for their families from the postmortem auction of their parts would suddenly find it worthwhile to have their MHC molecules typed and carry a donor card. Giving people property rights to their own bodies would create at least a billion potential donors overnight. The boost in the market for organs would also spur the development of whole-organ freezing protocols to build up organ banks, a long-overdue technology. Well, Canadian health commissars and FDA bureaucrats know full well that paying donors would work a thousand times better than whining and threatening. But the problem is that paying the donor for their kidney means that you recognize that the donor owns their body. This implies an extension of private property rights far beyond the limits that modern governments can allow. If people own their own hearts and kidneys, then they will inevitably begin to assert title to their bloodstreams as well. But if individuals hold the deeds to their bloodstreams, then the modern system of government ownership of citizens breaks down. If individuals rather than governments were permitted proprietary rights to bloodstreams, then Drug Prohibition would have no legal basis. If Drug Prohibition ends, the entire international regime would transform overnight. If Drug Prohibition were to end tomorrow, the Colombian civil war would stop for lack of funds. The Afghan warlords would be defunded as well, as would a hundred puny terrorist groups around the world. The crime rate in Washington DC and other American cities would collapse, returning to early-20th century, pre-Harrison Act levels. With addicts able to buy cheap drugs from drug stores (thus not needing to steal), and gangs unable to profit from a legal commodity, urban youth would lose their jobs in the illegal drug industry. They would have to become transplant surgeons, circulatory techs, and be tragically forced into other non-rap-star-compatible careers. Deaths from drug use (which are already not that high; most drug deaths in this country are from alcohol and tobacco) would plummet as pure, carefully dosed drugs were sold by companies guarding their product's reputation and fearful of liability suits. Addicts would also benefit from drug substitution, as they could choose from safer new drugs, or just more dilute versions of the old ones. This includes substitutes for the most dangerous and violent addicts: the alkies (sometimes known on the street as "Twelve-Steppers"). Synthetic substitutes for alcohol have been around for decades that don't destroy the liver. Some of them even have "sober-up" companion pills that yank the drugs right out of the neural receptor. But thanks to Drug Prohibition, these drugs are stuck forever in regulatory limbo. Does a future with no inner-city children gunned down in turf wars sound good to you? Not if you're a DEA or Customs bureaucrat. If Drug Prohibition ends, then YOU HAVE TO GET A REAL JOB. And we all know how painful that can be. Politicians will feel even more pain; a world where street crime is rare and peace keeps breaking out overseas is not a healthy world for politicians. Politicians may need transplants to live just as we do. But by definition, to the truly focused politician mere life isn't as important as staying in power. So who owns your heart, baby? A motley crew of commissars and medical guildsmen, with constant feuding and faction fighting changing the exact owners from day to day. Ownership can also change by geographic area; if you go to parts of the world where bribes are given the respect your hard-earned money deserves, you might even be able to rent a temporary time-share in your own spleen. But one thing is absolutely certain: you don't own your internal organs as long as you're in the United States of Homeland. And if you don't own your body, just what DO you really own? Bill Walker is a Research Associate at the Shay-Wright lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center. |
Wrong. Real estate (or "houses" to the author) is owned by the parties to the deed. Banks and tax authorities may have a valid security interest in real estate but have no ownership interest per se unless and until they gain ownership through foreclosure or other legal procedure.
I only point this out because this kind of uninformed "expertise" calls into question the accuracy of the rest of the article.
You know, curiosity killed the cat.
I figure he's rummaging through alleys looking for homeless drunks in some third-world South American country to steal organs from.
Since he couldn't steal the organs of an American (which happen to be the best in the world), he's relegated to looking for third-world organs in third-world countries.
But just like any good B-horror flick, he'll be back
LOL!
Banks have every right to keep a buyer on a leash until the note is paid.
'Governments', on the other hand, reduce real estate deeds to leases in the same way a mugger redistributes your wealth from your pocket to his...
By the ability to steal what is yours by force.
I just hope that he hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, supplying black market moslem members to the thriving San Francisco 'Add-a-dick-to-me' sex change clinics.
Jaded American lez-beans, tired of clumsy strap-ons, will pay a pretty penny for a swarthy goat-lover's rod of discipline...
Of course, filing one of those excluded you from receiving donated organs. But then, with their socialized medicine, you'd never get one anyway.
Something to the effect of-- "I can just see my daughter crying over my dead body saying you can't have my father's organs. When they tell her my kidneys are worth $30,000, she'll stop crying and ask, 'How about his liver and lungs?'"
Sounds like Germany.... 60 years ago.
Unfortunately, this is quite common. I've read too many credible accounts of this on the internet for it NOT to be true.
LOL! If they wind up using sand salamis, they will be severely disappointed. (You do know that the reason the moslem women wear garbs over their faces is so that their munchkin boyfriends won't realize they are laughing at their 'equipment'?)
Jaded American lez-beans, tired of clumsy strap-ons, will pay a pretty penny for a swarthy goat-lover's rod of discipline...
Let them believe that. As long as they think they will get a "better-than-satisfactory product", the dykes will bid the price up. Supply will have to increase to keep up with the hyped demand. This will result in a 'thinning of the herd' in moslem countries. Not a bad thing.
Before the bubble bursts and prior to the carpet munchkins realizing that there is a "no return" policy, it would be a good time to buy stock in companies that make electron microscopes so that the lesbos can see the product that they paid for. A prudent investor might also, at this point in the game, buy the stock of companies that make strap-ons since demand will skyrocket once the dykes realize that they have a defective product in their hands, so to speak.
In the US, organs are allocated by a board that spends its time deciding how to distribute them "fairly".
And thank YOU, Bill "Tainted Blood" Clinton.
BLOOD TRAIL: Neighbors exclude Illinois from organ-sharing network (8/19/99, Prince Charles)Sharing of organs to change == New System Ignores Regional Lines (11/1999, askel5)
After a last-minute plea by Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, members of Congress have cleared the way for the Clinton administration to enact a long-delayed regulation that will revamp the system for distributing donated organs. Under a deal struck Wednesday night between Shalala and members of the House and Senate who were ironing out details on health spending, the regulation, first proposed in February 1998, will go into effect 42 days after the spending ...
| Organ transplants need fairer distribution system ^ |
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| Posted by zbogwan2 On 04/11/2000 9:18 AM PDT with 4 comments Detroit News ^ | 04-11-00 | Ellen Goodman |
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| Organ transplants need fairer distribution system ^ |
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| Posted by zbogwan2 On 04/11/2000 10:03 AM PDT with 17 comments Detroit News ^ | 04-11-00 | Ellen Goodman To be frank, it never occurred to me that I have a Boston liver. A Boston accent, yes, I admit to that. But a Boston liver? Or for that matter, a Massachusetts kidney? I’ve had conversations with my family about organ donation, but not once did I think of donating my body parts to the nearest over the neediest. We may be parochial in New England, but not that parochial. Nevertheless, it turns out that this country has long practiced a highly lethal form of health care: medicine by geography. In the life-and-death business of transplant surgery, more than 60,000 ... |
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| Experts Argue for Mandatory Organ-Donor System ^ |
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| Posted by hscott On 03/12/2002 1:24 PM PST with 53 comments Yahoo from Amer. J. Kidney diseases ^ | 3/12/02 | Amy Norton NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Switching to a mandatory system of organ donation--one where viable organs are harvested from the recently deceased without the family's permission--would alleviate the nation's donor-organ shortages and prevent people from needlessly dying while waiting for an organ, according to two US and UK researchers. If nothing else, the idea should ``at least'' be discussed, they argue in an opinion piece in the March issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. About 77,000 Americans are on waiting lists for organ transplants, and having a ``conscription'' system for procuring organs from cadavers would extend and improve... |
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| New System Rates Patients for Organs ^ |
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| Posted by 2Trievers On 11/16/2001 1:22 PM PST with 1 comment AP via Yahoo! News ^ | Nov 16, 2001 | LAURA MECKLER By LAURA MECKLER, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Sophisticated medical criteria will be used to rank patients waiting for donated livers under a system approved unanimously by the nation's transplant network. The new system replaces one that relies heavily on how long a patient has been on a waiting list, although it does not break down the geographic boundaries that allow much shorter waits in some parts of the country. The new system gives each patient a score based on three lab tests and is expected to predict better which patients will die without transplants. ``It's a much more ... |
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Additional FR articles on "Organ Donation"
(As for me ... my heart goes where the wild goose goes.)
Only because it's NONSENSICAL and merely another indication of the rampant cognitive dissonance that makes for our Silly Putty society of useful idiots for whom the zenith of "rights" is the option to destroy, sell or suicide the carcass in which their Almighty (but not so very bright) slip of consciousness resides by Chance.
A Short Instruction on OwnershipMy Dear Wormwood –… The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and Hell, and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies – those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a royal child whom his father has placed, for love's sake, in titular command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counselors should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forest, and the corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor. We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun – the finely graded differences that run from "my boots" through "my dog," "my servant," "my wife," "my father," "my master," and "my country," to "my God." They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of "my boots," the "my" of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy bear," not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful), but "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like." And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say "my God" in a sense not really very different from "my boots," meaning "the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit – the God I have done a corner in." And all the time, the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run, either Our Father or the Enemy will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls and their bodies really belong – certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says "mine" of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it. Our Father hopes in the end to say "mine" of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest. Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape |
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As lagniappe, an insightful post by Romulus in reply ... the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation... |
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