The Organ Market

The underground organ market where economically deprived, poverty stricken poor men and women are selling their living organs to the rich men and women with money to pay. If one's loved one is struggling with an organ failure or severe malfunction, that one knows what it is like to be in this delicate painful scenario. It is true that since there is no effective government regulations except worthless "paper-laws" in world nations, in many cases, the underground activities in organ buying and selling have potential of bending the established rules, like discarding"brain-death standards, donor age limits and recipient health requirements. States have let transplant agencies put patients on life support, contrary to their living wills, to preserve their organs. If Congress revises its ban on organ sales, as some advocates hope, lawmakers in South Carolina plan to offer prisoners reduced sentences in exchange for organs or bone marrow."

Whether government wants it or not, the desperation that human being feels when death knocks on one's door, there will be unstoppable activities in this shadowy market. However, market capitalism can perhaps provide a palatable solution by "flooding the market with free organs", motivating everyone signing organ donation card can make economics play its part in supply and demand equation. Read the following excerpt:

The key to reversing the organ market is to turn that equation on its head. Stop fighting capitalism and start using it. What's driving the market is scarcity. Americans, Britons, Israelis, Japanese and South Koreans are going abroad for organs mostly because too few of their countrymen have agreed to donate organs when they die. Fewer than 40 percent of Americans have signed organ-donor cards, and only about half of their families consent to the donation of a loved one's organs. Some have religious objections. Others are squeamish. Many assume that if they don't supply the organs, somebody else will.

They're right. Somebody else will supply the organs. But that somebody won't be a corpse. It'll be a fisherman or an out-of-work laborer who needs cash and can't find another way to get it.

Regards,
Sohel

Link to Washington Post article:
The Organ Market