Maybe it Is Not a Kidney Problem After All

theunbrokenwindow ^

[newbie2008]

Many people have a moral objection to allowing the sale and purchase of body parts. I have no problem with that. But what an exercise like this does is force students to make explicit what the costs of their beliefs are. For example, if 60,000 people remain on the kidney donation waiting list each year, and each of these expects to die within 5 years, then holding the moral view of making kidney sales illegal is coming at a cost of pain and suffering and the ultimate death of AT LEAST this many people. Furthermore, we know that a recent eBay auction of a kidney was stopped at $5.7 million. That is an indication of what the marginal value of that first legally sold kidney would be, given the current situation. Clearly all 60,000 waiting listers would not be willing to pay this much, and estimates seem to settle around an expected market equilibrium price of $15,000 per kidney, but using that information together, and assuming a linear demand curve and a linear supply curve (with 10,000 donations currently happening at zero price) you might estimate the total economic cost of not permitting kidney sales to be in the range of $200 BILLION (I also assume in this calculation that once the cost of a kidney is low enough, demand is effectively inelastic and also a linear supply response from zero to the market clearing price … but see my next point for more on this). This seems extremely large, but if you recall that the median estimate from value of statistical life studies is around $5 million, and 60,000 people die each year from the kidney shortage, that gives a total of $300 billion in the gross value of these lives. So even if I am off by a factor of 10 on the deaths per year, it seems like at least $20 billion to $30 billion of value is being left on the table (again, I am ignoring the humanity of all of this for the time being).

[null and void]

*shrug* why buy a kidney when the fruits of stem cell research will allow you to grown a new one that is a perfect tissue match?

[dr_lew]

... but if you recall that the median estimate from value of statistical life studies is around $5 million, and 60,000 people die each year from the kidney shortage, that gives a total of $300 billion in the gross value of these lives.

Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

[BobbyT]

The real motivation for the ban on compensation for organs is that not every single last individual in the country (no wait, the world) could go out and buy one. Regardless of the dreadful state of affairs we have now, if there is someone somewhere who can’t afford it, it should be denied to all. In other words, “better they die”.

It’s the same as the objections to “sweat shops”. Because the wages for the jobs created, though they may be 5-10x the next best alternative, are still very low in terms of developed countries, the left wants them banned. $1/hour for manual labor? How dreadful. “Better they starve”.

This kind of meddling also brings us things like net “neutrality”, and with the way things are headed, socialized medicine: ban any service with different options or upgrades, so that instead of having competing options to improve the service you have everyone forced into the perpetual lowest common denominator.