It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [69]
Because your body is your property, you should have the right to decide to live without one of your kidneys and be compensated accordingly (and conversely, to acquire a kidney through a voluntary trade). It is your body, your decision, your choice. Why does the government even care what you do with your organs, especially when that organ is saving the life of another human being?
Currently, the federal government acts as the only authority with the power to buy and allocate kidneys for transplantation. The 1984 Act established the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), to contract the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which administers the OPTN under contract from the Department of Health and Human Services.10 (See how the government did that—taking absolute control through a complicated mess of inefficient networks so that we have no control over the destiny of own organs?)
As you read this, there are more than 85,583 people waiting on the official kidney-transplant list in the United States.11 With kidney, pancreas, liver, intestine, heart, and lung combined, there are more than a whopping 108,098 people waiting for some kind of organ in homes and hospitals across the nation. In the United States alone, just 16,500 individuals received a kidney transplant in 2008 while almost 7,000 died waiting for one.12 Thirteen die daily.13 With a population of more than 300 million, we have a grand total of more than 600 million kidneys (we each have two, but can function with one)—my instinct is that the government is doing something wrong.
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How Did We Get Here?
While people may be repulsed at the discussion of organ trading for compensation, they shouldn’t be; we already engage in forms of it. Every day, heart valves are replaced, and amputees receive other people’s limbs. People exchange their semen, eggs, and plasma for money. For tens of thousands of dollars, women generously rent out their wombs for those who cannot bear children. We donate blood in exchange for little perks like movie tickets and candy. How can an exchange take place in these situations but not under circumstances including vital organs? The federal government flippantly and arbitrarily makes these rules, but does it have its reasons? Does it have the authority?
In 1984, an “overzealous entrepreneur” testified before Congress of his plans to ship in impoverished people from developing countries, remove their organs to undergird our shortage, and return the “donors” to their homelands with a sum of money to compensate them for their efforts.14 Appalled, Congress, spearheaded by Al Gore, a Tennessee congressman at the time, enacted the National Organ Transplant Act. While the legislature may have been well intentioned, the consequences have been highly intrusive and purely negative. People are dying, and the need for organs has increased yearly. Although Gore did propose “a voucher system or a tax credit to a donor’s estate” if “efforts to improve voluntary donation are unsuccessful,”15 the United States continues to flounder despite attempts to promote donation after more than twenty-five years. Clearly, the government’s efforts have been unsuccessful with more than 80,000 people on kidney-transplant waiting lists. The system is broken, and the time for change is now. It is time to look to compensation, incentives, and market practices to solve the problem. However, under current federal law, we can’t. In Pennsylvania, for example,