Thank you Mr. Chapman! I have, with less public reach, beaten this drum for nealy 20 years.
Everybody else in the “food chain” exchanges money. The doctor is paid, the hospital is paid, the drug makers are paid, patients and their insurers pay, but somehow it is “immoral” to compensate donors? Somehow, since it relates to a purely elective procedure, I can be paid market rate to masturbate for dollars, but a kidney or marrow donation, way more inconvenient, the recipient can’t even give me gas money?
And what of the “donations” that can only come from the deceased, heart, lung, liver etc. ? I’m not talking E-bay auctions, but perhaps a flat payment of enough money to pay for a funeral or asurviving child’s college tuition would encourage donations, save lives, and spread among multiple tranplant procedures, increase the cost minimally. Allocate the money through a self-replenishing fund and payments through the organ bank now existing.
Our pursuit of moral purity in donations is costing thousands of reallives every year.
I heard a strange, but I think accurate analogy, to paid for organ donations. College football, and the absolute unwillingness of colleges to pay student athletes who bring in millions of dollars to their programs.
The vast majority of such students will never become pro athletes, yet face grueling training, injury and disability, resulting in enormous sums of money to their schools. But all of these schools panic when faced with the idea of actually compensating students for these huge profits.
It used to be anathema to pay for blood or plasma donations, but the demand was so high, that a nominal fee was agreed to, just enough for someone desperate for cash to try. The same, on a much larger scale, with human egg donations, which involves real surgery.
So eventually, I can imagine organ donations made for profit, and even people signing agreements that if they die in such a way that their organs become available, that their families receive payment in exchange.
While the government may not permit that at first, eventually *a* government will, which will start “organ transfer tourism.”
Walter Williams has also been an outspoken proponent of this for some time, and I have to agree with his argument. There are three basic tenets to ownership, posession, use and disposal. If a government controls these, do you truly own yourself, and are you truly free? I would much rather my religion (which I voluntarily subscribe to) tell me what I can and can’t do with my body, than a government which I may or may not agree with, and will use force to make me comply with its rules.