Dutch May Compensate Kidney Donors

by chaz | November 20, 2007 at 03:33 pm

452 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Dutch May Compensate Kidney Donors

"The Dutch health minister, Ab Klink, is considering a recommendation to offer free health insurance for life to anyone who donates a kidney for transplant," reports The London Times. "The initiative has been prompted by a chronic shortage of organ donors in the Netherlands. With an average waiting list of four years, one of the longest in Europe, about 200 Dutch people die each year while waiting for a new kidney."

In the Cato Policy Analysis "A Gift of Life Deserves Compensation: How to Increase Living Kidney Donation with Realistic Incentives," Dr. Arthur Matas writes: "The best way to increase the supply of kidneys without drastically changing the existing allocation system is to legalize a regulated system of compensation for living kidney donors. Such a system could be established using the infrastructure already in place for evaluating deceased donors and allocating their organs. The only change required to ease and probably even solve the organ shortage is some form of payment for donors.

"The potential practical and theoretical concerns with compensated donation can be overcome, and alternative proposals will not do enough to solve the shortage. Upon careful analysis, it is clear that the benefits of a regulated system of compensated donation (chiefly, increasing the number of donated kidneys) outweigh any risks."

I wondered why governments think you would donate your organs, when you can't get a transplant if you need one... What is the incentive to help rich people that can afford a transplant, but they expect you to die because you don't have the money for a transplant, I also thought that the poor and uninsured should drop out of the DONOR program until the people with the money step up to the plate and pay for the organs just as they pay for the doctor, hospital and the blood and drugs they use. Love and alturism is great but it doesn't move the masses.

Has anyone created a drug that makes organs unusable so that people can safely make their own organs absolutely useless to these organ vultures? The step beyond what the Dutch have planned will be to simply pass a law that allows the government to use everyone as possible donors despite your desire, and then call it for the "public good".

OutSourcedNews

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon