Yes, we really do need to start paying kidney donors

We have long been pointing out that the solution to the shortage of kidneys available for transplant is to offer to pay those donors who might be willing to donate one. Adter all, it's not exactly a new insight that increasing prices brings forth more supply. And the sort of levels of payment necessary are in fact cheaper than the cost to the NHS of dialysis. The New York Times has a nice piece on how this works elsewhere:

Iran’s system has many deficiencies — not least that the very idea clashes with ethical norms observed in many other countries — and the program varies greatly from region to region. But its chief advantage is this: People who need kidneys get them rapidly, rather than die on the waiting list.

In the vast majority of cases, donors know in advance what they will be paid and receive appropriate screening and good medical care before and during the operation. And by getting patients new kidneys instead of keeping them on dialysis, the society saves a lot of money and avoids much misery.

Whatever anyone's doubts about whether people ought to be paid for organ donation there's no doubt that it does actually work.

“We should ask ourselves why some people find accepting money to donate a kidney and save a life repugnant, but accepting money for being a policeman or miner or soldier — all of which are statistically riskier than donating a kidney — is O.K.,” said Mohammad Akbarpour, a research fellow in the Becker-Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago. “Is there a fundamental difference?”

It could be that people simply don't understand how low that relative risk is.

Commercializing kidneys calls up images of a filthy, makeshift clinic, a rich traveler with a wad of cash, a desperately poor donor tricked into selling an organ, and a broker who keeps 90 percent of the money. India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa and Indonesia, among other countries, are known for this type of trafficking in organs, and wealthy Americans, Israelis and Europeans are known for buying them.

But in Iran, the legal market pre-empts these abuses. To prevent kidney tourism, recipients in Iran have to share the nationality of their donors, and Iran recently banned kidneys for all foreigners except refugees in Iran from Afghanistan. “The rate of people who die in surgery is much, much lower in Iran than in other developing countries — all the transplants are under supervision,” said Farshad Fatemi, an assistant professor of economics at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, who studies the kidney market. “If this regulated market weren’t in place, we might have organ trafficking here. We might be more like India or China and have illegal clinics, a black market where nobody looks after patients and donors.”

And there we have something that we have again been saying repeatedly. Markets are going to exist where human desire is great enough. It happens with sex, it happens with drugs, it is happening with organ transplants. In all three we argue that said market will be safer, will work better, if the activity itself is legal so that regulation, if that's necessary, is possible. Insisting that these things are illegal is part of what makes them so dangerous.

So, given that we've got the example of the one and only place in the world where people do not die waiting for a transplant, when are we going to institute our own paid market in them? For it really is true that people die, in great pain, each and every year simply because of some squeamishness about introducing filthy lucre into the proceedings.

As ever, there really are some thing so important that we must have markets in them.