New York City is starting a pilot program in which, for the next five months, an organ-recovery team will trail ambulances responding to 911 calls, ready to leap in if the patient dies and is a viable donor. It’s a bold experiment: no other American city has even tried it. Yet officials have already warned that the program, financed with a $1.5 million grant, might not yield a single kidney.
Full article on the market for organ donation.
How much money is New York willing to spend to buy an organ? Answer: zero.
Good point, Joe. New York is willing to waste money on organs, but it’s unwilling to actually spend money on organs.
At, say, $25,000 per kidney, they could have purchased 60 kidneys with that money.
Neil, Gary Becker estimates the free market price of a kidney at about $15,000. That means New York could have purchased 100 kidneys. See this explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker
If NYC was willing to buy an organ, where would they go to buy one?
Steve
There’s actually a free method of increasing the supply of organs without any of the ethical questions that buying organs brings up. Just make organ donation opt out instead of opt in. Now, on your drivers license, you have to opt in for organ donation, and the participation rate is low. If you made it opt out the participation rate would be close to 100%.
Can you imagine being in an ambulance and having the organ harvester team peering in the back door? Yeah… It adds a whole additional layer of anxiety there.
artk, haven’t we already seen an example of a (coercive) liver donation in the movie Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tmLvzubP3I