Famous R&B singer Natalie Cole recently underwent a successful kidney transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Ms. Cole should count herself among the lucky ones. According to the United Procurement and Transplant Network, over 84,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant. Thousands will die this year, stuck on the waiting list.
Why is there a kidney shortage? Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker claims it’s because there’s no market for them, since the buying and selling of organs is illegal. Or put differently, when the maximum amount of money you can get in return for a kidney is $0, the demand is always going to be higher than the supply.
Becker explains:
“If laws were changed so that organs could be purchased and sold, some people would give not out of altruism, but for the financial gain. The result would be an increased supply of organs.”
Becker estimates that price of a kidney would be about $15,000. At this price, he predicts that the increase in supply would save thousands of lives each year.
There are certainly potential negative consequences to opening the market to human organs. Low-income Americans might end up feeling pressure to undergo the procedure, and others might act impulsively or in a financial emergency and later regret the decision. But the current situation has negative consequences as well: the 4,000 people who die waiting for a life-saving kidney.
Clearly this is a controversial issue with major moral implications, but too often when politicians discuss moral policies, the economics of the matter are left by the wayside.
