USA Today reports on a study by researchers at the University of Philadelphia on attitudes toward monetary compensation for live kidney donors.
The study, published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, asked 342 participants whether they would donate a kidney with varying payments of $0, $10,000 and $100,000. The study called for a real-world test of a regulated payment system.
The possibility of payments nearly doubled the number of participants in the study who said they would donate a kidney to a stranger, but it did not influence those with lower income levels more than those with higher incomes, according to Scott Halpern, one of the study’s authors and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.
As the article notes, almost all live kidney donations occur where there is some family bond. Less than 100 people become live kidney donors for strangers each year. The result is that in 2009, 6,475 people died while awaiting a kidney transplant.
Yet the ethicists opposed to paying live kidney donors quoted in the USA Today story largely rely on the “ick” factor — since we pay people for blood, unfertilized eggs, and for surrogate motherhood today (to mention nothing of compensating people to become human targets by entering the military) but we don’t pay people to donate kidneys, well, there’s just something wrong with compensation for kidney donations.
George Annas, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University’s School of Public Health, predicts a payment system would result in an increase in health care costs for transplants. He says the study raises the question of whether the United States really wants to put body parts on the market, even a regulated one.
“I would not be against a reasonable trial to see how it works … (but) we do not want a society in which the rich literally live off the bodies of the poor,” Annas says.
Of course the study in question found that income levels weren’t not a major factor in deciding whether or not individuals told researchers they would be willing to become live donors given enough compensation.
But more importantly, the question is not whether Annas will get to live in a world where people are compensated for becoming live kidney donors, but whether any of those 6,475 people who died last year — and the thousands who will die this year — might have a chance at living in a world where there was financial compensation for live kidney donors.
As one of the study’s authors, Scott Halpern, told USA Today,
There’s no real reason why that model [the current Organ Procurement and transplantation Network] has to be continued. There’s nothing intrinsically unique about organ donations that requires it to be a truly altruistic act.