Paying families of organ donors would save lives, these economists say : NPR
Thousands of people die each year while waiting for organ donation. The indicator The team speaks with two economists who argue that paying organ donors’ families would save lives.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Thousands of people die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong of The Indicator present an idea to solve this problem. This involves compensation.
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ADRIAN MA: Anytime you have demand for something and limited supply, you have a market. And when it comes to the market for human organs, Harvard economist Alex Chan says the stakes are abundantly clear.
ALEX CHAN: So the level of inefficiency is also staggering, right? In this market, more than 5,000 people die each year while waiting for organs.
MA: They are waiting for kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs. The government spends billions of dollars each year on health care for people on the waiting list.
WAILIN WONG: Recently, Alex and his colleague, Kurt Sweat, offered to help.
MA: And here’s their idea in a nutshell. When a person dies in hospital, their organs can be donated if they are a registered organ donor or if the family gives consent. In either case, Kurt says the government should reimburse donor families for their funeral expenses. But that’s not all.
CHAN: Other things that could be covered are things like support for the donor’s family.
MA: Consider travel and hotel rooms for families who want to be near their loved one throughout the donation process. The amount of compensation could be capped at between $6,000 and $8,000, the typical cost of funeral services. And the result, they estimate, would be a 9 to 35 percent increase in the number of organ donations each year.
WONG: And as a result, they say thousands more lives would be saved and the government would save money because there would be fewer people on the waiting list needing expensive, long-term medical treatment. So on paper, this seems like a pretty good idea, right?
MA: That’s true, except for a few potentially glaring issues. The first being that under current law, this entire proposal is illegal.
WONG: Oh. Minor detail.
MA: Minor detail.
WONG: Yeah. In 1984, Congress passed the National Organ Transplantation Act, which prohibited, among other things, the exchange of any human organ for, quote, “valuable consideration” — money for organs, basically. Imagine if the organ market revolved around rich people paying for poor people’s organs. It would be incredibly dystopian, like an episode of “Black Mirror.”
MA: What Alex and Kurt are proposing here is far from it. And Alex argues that changing the law to allow compensation for donations already has precedent. After all, he points out that people can be paid to donate blood plasma, and that a person who donates their entire body to medical research is actually allowed to have their funeral expenses covered.
WONG: But let’s put aside the legal issues for a moment and talk about another potential problem with their proposal, ethics. Is it even fair to offer this kind of incentive to people in exchange for their decision to donate? This is how Alex sees it.
CHAN: People worry that financial incentives will somehow corrupt this gift of life that is an intact thing, the whole transplant process. But if we think about the process more holistically, right? – many players already benefit from incentives.
MA: He says the transplant surgeon is paid to perform the operation. Organizations that purchase organs are paid for this work. But the donors and their families?
CHAN: They are the true heroes of a story. They are the ones who are actually excluded from the system where incentives are built in.
WONG: He says that by allowing them to be compensated for funerals, hotel and travel expenses, it would make the system fairer, especially for people who might have trouble affording those things. Wailin Wong.
MA: Adrian Ma, NPR News.
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