Kidney and liver sales would add 10% to 15% to the cost of transplants, a study says. Others say organ markets would exploit poor donors.
By Kevin B. O’Reilly
American Medical News
January 28, 2008
Nearly 100,000 Americans are waiting for an organ transplant. Every day, the wait for 17 of those people ends in death.
It is a wait that could be drastically shortened or even eliminated if a market for live and cadaveric organs were allowed to operate, according to a paper co-authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker, PhD, and published last year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dr. Becker and co-author Julio Jorge Elias, PhD, estimate that a $15,000 payment for kidneys would increase the number of transplants by 44%, to about 20,000 a year. It would take nearly $40,000 in cash to donors to net a two-thirds jump in the number of liver transplants, to more than 8,600 a year.
In the case of kidney transplants, the donor payment would add just 9.5% to the cost of a transplant, while liver transplants would cost 11.2% more.
The authors based their estimates on how much it would take to convince a person earning the median American salary of $35,000 to become a donor, considering the actuarial value of a statistical life, the small risk of death in surgery, the quality-of-life impact and the value of the time spent in recovery.
Benjamin Hippen, MD, is a nephrologist specializing in renal transplantation at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C. He supports paying organ donors — or “vendors,” as he calls them.
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2008/01/28/prsb0128.htm
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Vendors? Of their own organs?
Those who support treating health care as a commodity surely didn’t imply that we should go to this extreme. Or did they?