Jackie Danicki

Virginia Postrel, who recently donated an organ herself, writes:

Expecting people to take risks and give up something of value without compensation strikes me as far more blatant exploitation than paying them. I don’t expect soldiers or police officers to work for free, and I don’t think we should base our entire organ donation system on the idea that everyone but the donor should get paid. Like all price controls, that creates a shortage–in this case, a deadly one.

Further:

The issue of lost wages is a significant one, especially since kidney patients and their friends and families are disproportionately likely to be of lower socioeconomic status. In many cases, people who might be willing to serve as living donors simply cannot take the chance of financial ruin posed by losing a few weeks of pay (and that’s assuming their understanding bosses would give them leave).

The National Kidney Foundation is shamefully, unbelievably trying to put a stop to any discussion of the use of market mechanisms to reduce the national organ shortage. They even wrote a letter to the AEI, urging them not to hold a debate on the matter.

Virginia has also written a column for Forbes (not available online for free, sadly) about how some prominent hospitals are actually refusing to do kidney transplants for people who’ve found their donors online or through other media. Hospitals which are denying patients legal, nonexperimental, life-saving surgery for ideological reasons include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. On her blog, Virginia writes:

The transplant establishment is, unfortunately, all too accustomed to managing the shortage rather than expanding the supply of organs. Too many powerful “experts” consider a donor who is moved by a particular stranger’s story to be a generic “altruistic donor,” for whom one stranger should be exactly the same as another. By their lights, favoring someone you’ve read about over whoever’s first on the list is “unfair.”

If you’ve ever seen the benefits of online conversation, through blogs or journals or message boards or chat rooms, think about that. The human kindness extended to you by another individual in that context, according to these hospitals, is somehow tainted.

I thought things were bad enough with the creepazoids who want to violate every human’s civil liberties at birth by reversing non-consent to make organ donation an opt-out rather than opt-in personal decision (“You think your body belongs to you? Think again, buster. It’s just government inventory…”). This outright hostility from hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation towards methods which would resolve the shortage and save lives is downright evil.

Filed under: Individuality vs Collectivism, Law, Life, Politics, Survival, The State Is Not Your Friend