I say if you want to go on SSDI, you should have to donate a working kidney.....that’ll stop some of the fraud.
I have no problem with this as long as the market decides what the cost of your organs should be and not the government.
I personally wouldn’t sell my extra kidney for a dollar less than $100,000.
I have already sold 8 kidneys. Boy are those people bummed, they woke up after a night out on the town missing one of their kidneys.
This begs a fundamental question: Who owns your body—You or the government?
If the government lays claim, what compensation does an individual receive reference the “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment?
I won't argue over the intrinsic "value" they provide to the recipients of these organs, but the entire process for preserving and transplanting them is rife with moral and ethical dilemmas that can't easily be reconciled.
1. In the case of an organ harvested from a dead person, there is an underlying incentive to remove the organs while the donor is still alive under the normal, objective standards of defining death.
2. Even the simple act of a competent adult donating an "extra" organ has its problems. A doctor who performs a surgical procedure that neither treats the patient, makes the patient healthier (it actually makes the patient worse off), nor prevents or remedies any medical condition is violating the very first provision of the Hippocratic Oath ("First, do no harm ...").
About a year ago, our church held a meeting re will/trusts and other serious matters.
One of the attendees brought up a serious and interesting point.
Her brother in his 50’s was in an accident and after a few days in the hospital, he was declared brain dead.
His trust and driver’s license showed that he wanted to donate whatever organs were needed at that time.
So the hospital kept his body alive until all of his donated organs were harvested. That took a couple of days.
Very quickly, his widow got a big financial surprise, the hospital had close to $40,000’s of EOL hospital services for the time his body was kept alive for the harvest of his whatevers.
His insurance company refused to pay for those charges because he was legally dead. The hospital aggressively went after the estate and the widow for the charges.
Since then, no one really wants to discuss this hot potato subject. So my wife and I changed our EOL orders, and we are not donators of any organs, tissues or whatever.
What is the reality here re who picks up the cost of keep a body alive after the donor is dead? Is it the recipients or the donor’s family/estate?