Strike The Root

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

New Legal Organ Market 

Hope for Patients on Uncle Sam’s Medical Death Row

by David Undis 

Uncle Sam’s death penalty on people waiting for an organ transplant was imposed over 6,000 times last year.  It will eventually claim half of the 85,000 people now on the transplant waiting list and half of the 35,000 people who will join the list this year.  A new free market in human organs offers these people hope. 

The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 made buying and selling human organs a criminal act.  Americans can give away their organs, but they can’t sell them.  This government-mandated price-control scheme, with the minimum and maximum price both set at $0.00, worsened the already-existing shortage of organs needed for transplant operations.  Ongoing advances in transplant technology cause the demand for organs to keep rising, so the shortage gets worse every year. 

Any economist will tell you that price controls cause shortages.  But this is no academic economic exercise.  This government-caused shortage kills real people at the rate of one every 90 minutes.  And to add insult to injury, it kills people in the name of protecting us from exploitation.  Yes, that’s the reasoning behind criminalizing our free use of our most private property--our bodies. 

I found another way to put free market forces to work ending the organ shortage, so I started LifeSharers. 

LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ and tissue donors.  Membership is free, and anybody can join at www.lifesharers.com.  Members agree to donate their organs and tissue when they die, but only to fellow LifeSharers members (unless no member is a suitable match).  LifeSharers members say, in effect, “You can have first dibs on my organs, but only if you agree to donate yours.”  By directing their donations in this way, LifeSharers members create a pool of organs that are potentially available only to fellow members. 

The existence of this pool rewards people for being donors.  It also creates an incentive for non-donors to become donors.  The size of this incentive grows as the LifeSharers network expands.  It’s a classic example of the “network effect.”  Imagine what it will be like when LifeSharers has a million members.  Anyone who might ever need an organ will be crazy not to join, because they’ll be cutting themselves off from a million livers, a million hearts, two million kidneys, two million lungs, two million corneas, and more. 

LifeSharers acts like a futures market in organs.  Membership is like insurance against the future unavailability of organs.  LifeSharers members contract for preferred access to the organs of fellow members.  In exchange, they agree to donate their own organs when they die.  Nothing in this arrangement runs afoul of Uncle Sam’s ban on buying or selling organs. 

The government treats donated organs as a national resource, giving donors no say in who gets their organs.  LifeSharers members retain control over their private property, allocating them to fellow members first.  We respect the medical judgments behind the rules that rank patients on the transplant waiting list.  We just insist that those rules be applied to our members first, before giving our organs to people who haven’t agreed to donate their own.  We’re not trying to keep organs from the people who need them most.  On the contrary, our goal is to attract so many members that the organ shortage will completely disappear.  Then there will be enough organs for everybody, even the people on the bottom of the waiting list. 

LifeSharers is the best legal way to end the organ shortage.  It uses market forces, it respects property rights, and it’s totally voluntary.  It’s the best hope for everybody waiting for organs the government won’t let them get.  And who knows, if you join today the next life you save may be your own.