Organ Market
From Zanecorpwiki
We should really develop a national organ market. Sounds macabre, but I think it's a good idea.
We currently don't allow people to sell their organs, largely because of fears it would be abused. There is certainly some truth to this, but there are many unintended consequences. The most important is that operations that many people need (liver and kidney transplants) are unaffordable even for the well insured and well off. A liver transplant costs about $1M.
One fear is that organs would come mostly from the poor and go mostly to the rich (on a per-capita basis at least). Even granting this as true, it's not a negative in-and-of-itself. On a per-capita basis, the rich have more cars, more houses, more land which are built and tended by the poor, so why should organs be any different?
A more substantial fear is that if the sale of organs were permitted, then people would be killed for their organs. The narrative behind this is based largely on analogy to the black market and goes something like, "You can sell an organ on the black market for a lot of money--like $100,000--this is enough to put the common citizen in danger of being targeted for organ harvesting." The problem is that whatever price you could get on the black market is much higher than a legal, broad market would bear. The current price is high precisely because it's illegal to sell organs.
Still, we would not want to allow or encourage the desperately poor, in a fit of depression, to harm themselves or others or anything like that, and this is obviously a market where we'd want a fair amount of regulation and oversight. Under no scenario should a hospital be buying kidneys out of an igloo cooler form "some guy."
Instead, we could have a sort of reverse insurance. In exchange for agreeing to sell your organs, you get some amount of money based on the health and desirability of your organs. In addition, free checkups as part of the assessment process. Even at a few hundred dollars a year, I would think this would be attractive to many, many people and the price would naturally settle at a level to provide a good supply of organs from those unfortunate enough to die while in the program, but I'm guessing it would actually be pretty low so the incentive to kill people to harvest the organ would be almost nil. Also, they receive money for participating while they live, so the organ itself is useless.
Transplant operations would become more routine and affordable. We'd get better at them and you wouldn't need to be a millionaire or have triple coverage to afford the operations.
There would be a few negative consequences, but it seems pretty clear to me that we'd be in a much better position than we are now. There'd be a much improved supply of organs. Not only would there be little incentive to abuse the system, but there would almost certainly be less incentive than currently exists. It would be a good way for many people to supplement their income, and last but not least, by paying on quality of the organ, there are built in incentives for people to stay healthy. One can easily imagine the programming including some amount of free medical care, a gym membership, nutrition consulting, as well as cash payment.
