Worth of a Kidney

I found this interesting article on Health Beat about the idea of creating a legal market for donor kidneys. It talks about the ways that kidney donation by live donors is expanding, and wonders whether, since the need is still far greater than is being met, it might be effective to pay donors a set price, within a regulated market.

There's a decidedly uneasy feeling to this idea from an ethical standpoint, but it might still be something worth considering and talking about, even if we ultimately decide we can't do it without crossing a line we don't want to cross.

The article also discusses organ markets in other parts of the world that inevitably exploit those with few other options, and addresses the fact that we know very little about the long-term effects of live donation. A living person can donate a kidney with relatively few immediate ill effects, but apparently there have been no real studies of how donors fare years later.

This is definitely one of those topics that is fascinating but not really easy to think about.