blood banks screening
Why is it illegal to sell your own internal organs?
I can see the downside of this, where only the rich would get the organs, but what if it went into a blood bank type thing. Then it would be distributed by the hospital to the next person on the list?
And like the blood, it would be screened and tested for diseases.
In theory, it protects the poor from being coerced or tempted into selling their organs. There’s also a common perception (self-serving, pretentious and false IMNSHO) that organ donation has to be a ‘gift’ and it’s somehow ‘wrong’ for you to benefit from it. (Please don’t let me get started on that.)
In practice, the restriction allows *EVERYONE EXCEPT THE DONOR* to benefit; the doctor who ‘harvests’ the organs, the people who operate the match databases, the people who transport them, and especially the guy who puts it into the recipient. (A heart-lung-liver transplant takes about 20 hours but nets over $100,000; do one a week and you can make $5 MILLION a year.)
The organ transplant business – and it is a business now – is a huge moneymaker for high end hospitals. Enough so that many hospitals now hire ‘counselors’ whose only job is to use emotional manipulation to convince vulnerable grieving families to sign over the parts of their deceased (and often not so deceased) loved ones. It’s enough of a profit maker that China makes a large scale practice of manufacturing political offenses to arrest and execute people for, so that their tissues and organs can be sold on the international market.
If people were allowed to sell their organs – either in life or for the benefit of their estate – the supply would increase exponentially; but then the profits, especially of the ‘gatekeeper’ agencies, would plummet in turn. And we can’t have *that* now can we?
Quantum Voluntary Blood Donation Program Part 1 of 4