HUMAN ORGANS

Congress should allow the buying and selling of human organs

Congress should allow the buying and selling of human organs

Introduction

Suppose you go to the hospital after experiencing several days of nausea, fatigue and trouble urinating. After having test after a test run on you and spending your week in and out of the hospital, you are told that you are in need of a kidney transplant. The news would be devastating; however the journey to receiving a transplant has just begun. Your first step would probably be to contact the finest transplant facility and the best doctors. They would evaluate you and put you on the organ transplant waiting list. (Garner, 2008)

On this list you could sit and wait a very long time. You undergo dialysis often and feel weaker by the day. Are you ever going to get a kidney? You ask yourself the question a thousand times. It is a question that has no definitive answer. Thousands of Americans die every year while on organ transplant waiting lists. The system in place today allows some of those on waiting lists to wither away and die. This seems incredulous due to medical technology advances and increases in transplant surgery survival rates. So are there even enough organs out there to go around? The answer is a simple yes. However, under the current government regulated system, in which organs cannot be sold by the donor, the number of people dying on waiting lists is sobering. (Cullen, 2010)

Every year over 1,300 people die awaiting heart transplants and over 3,000 people die awaiting kidney transplants (United Network for Organ Sharing, 2010). The problems are the lack of quality donated organs. The government has only allowed a select handful of organizations to run the transplant industry. The solution: repeal the National Organ Transplant Act and allow the free market to work for the sick and dying, instead of against them, as at present. (Hansmann, 2009)

The system today

In 1984 the U.S. Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) to regulate and help organize the growing field of organ transplants (U.S. Congress 1984). The act laid out the requirements to organize a qualified organ procurement agency, the requirements to join the organ procurement and transplantation network, accounting practices within the organ procurement and transplantation organizations, and prohibited the purchase of organs or tissue. (Garner, 2008)

The act called for an Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, or OPTN, to be run by private, nonprofit organizations under federal contract. The only organization of this kind is the United Network for Organ Sharing or UNOS. UNOS was the first certified in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of the OPTN. UNOS works in conjunction with organ procurement agencies and transplant centers. Under the integrated contact, UNOS has established an organ sharing network that the organization claims to “maximize the efficient use of deceased organs through equitable and timely allocation”. (Garner, 2008)

UNOS also “guided persons and organizations” concerned with transplants in order to ...