Incentives for Organ Donation

Lottery tickets for vaccination seems to have been reasonably succesful. What else could we use incentives for? Al Roth sends us to kidney surgeon Arthur Matas’s argument for testing incentives for organ donation:

A regulated system of incentives for donation could provide a sizable increase in the number of kidneys available for transplant. Yet incentives for kidney donation are illegal in the US.
…Initially, the concept of incentives for living donation can be unsettling (some have said “repugnant”4). Yet ethicists worldwide have argued that there is no ethical reason to prohibit incentives. And studies show that the public is in favor of incentives. Additionally, dialysis is more expensive than transplant; a regulated system of incentives would be cost saving to the health care system.

We accept kidney donation. Any successful argument against incentivized donation must be able to differentiate it from our currently accepted conventional donation. Notably, incentives are legal for plasma, sperm, and egg donation or surrogate motherhood, and certainly there are risks involved with egg donation and surrogate motherhood. Gill and Sade5 argue that the only difference between donating and selling is monetary self-interest, and monetary self-interest alone does not warrant legal prohibition.

It is time to move past the feelings that incentives are wrong to the reality that as a result of a potentially preventable shortage of organs, patients on the waiting list are dying or becoming too sick to transplant….It is time for professional societies and patient groups to advocate for changing the law to allow trials of incentives for donation.

See many previous posts at MR on organ donation and blood donation.

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