Not in my lifetime here has that ever been the case. You can sign up to be an organ donor via your licence renewal, or via the organ registry donation scheme, but it was never a ‘default in’ for anybody, whether they were publicly or privately insured.
Huh?
In Spain the only donations that have associated medical expenses are those done outside the public-or-chartered system (IVF involving donation for someone who already has one child might be the only case); the only ones that have an associated payment are ova donations (a tiny amount which is supposed to compensate for lost workdays, but you can make more money selling paper flowers on the street).
We’ve been opt-out for years and, speaking as someone in whose school “signing up for donation” was one of the things you did in your 18th birthday*, having it like that is saved paperwork. The system isn’t completely opt-out in that the family are asked and can deny donation, but the usual decision is to donate.
NM, dupe post.
FWIW, my country, Spain, has been a “default in” (implied consent to donation; must opt out of organ donation explicitly) country for many years already. Ever since, it has been one of the top countries in the world by number of transplants carried out. Also, there has been little to no controversy regarding that particular policy for donor consent.
There are several other countries that do the same. France switching to implied consent is not a particularly surprising move.
Please point to a precedent where, outside of trauma where an amputation is critical to saving a life and the person in unable to speak for themselves, where it has been deemed legal to cut pieces off of/out of a human being without consent any time in the last 50 years.
Also, France is not common law, it uses the Napoleonic Code.
So…still not going to explain how it is that free healthcare, makes opt in systems, theft, even though you’ve been asked to clarify twice?
Well, it was just part of the old social contract, in the old Aus/English system. Doctors donated their time free to treat public hospital patients at teaching hospitals: Patients consented to being the subjects of teaching and learning, including the donation of organs for teaching and learning, in return for medical treatment.
Arguably, the “consent” was not “free consent”. without undo influence: and that argument was made very strongly, though indirectly, as part of the change in the model of free health care from “charitable” to “rights based”.
I hope that wasn’t directed at me (it immediately followed one of my posts) as I never made such a claim, someone else did.
Well, as I mentioned in my first post, the social contract was breaking down at the same time that organ transplant started to become possible, so if your experience is limited to organ donation via licence renewal, “not in my lifetime” doesn’t cover the relevant period.
Spain also has the most traffic fatalities, from what I’ve read. You’ve got more organs lying around, so to speak.
Uhhh… you are misinformed, then. Or perhaps are working with extremely old statistics?
The number of dead in Spanish roads has been falling steadily since its peak in 1990. The following webpage includes a historical report as well as a graph that shows how deaths in traffic accidents evolved in Spain since 1970 until 2014, measured in deaths per 100,000 people.
In 2014 there were 3.6 deaths per 100,000 people on Spanish roads, down from a peak of 23.3 deaths per 100,000 in 1990. As of today Spain has less dead in traffic accidents (measured in deaths per 100,000 people) than many other countries in Europe and the rest of the world.
Link to the info: https://knoema.com/atlas/Spain/topics/Transportation/Road-Accidents/Traffic-deaths-per-100-000-inhabitants
By comparison, in 2014 the US had 10.2 deaths on the road per 100,000 people: close to 3 times the Spanish rate.
Link to the info: https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Transportation/Road-Accidents/Traffic-deaths-per-100-000-inhabitants
Not after death.
And you have given consent- but not opting out.
Actually they are allowed to arbitrarily withdraw money from his/her account- taxes, escheatment, etc. In fact, if you dont have a will or a POD, they will do exactly that " arbitrarily withdraw money from his/her account" according to laws or probate.
That is your assumption. Has it ever, in fact, been tested in court or law?
After all, the wishes of a deceased person are often backed by law, that’s the whole point of having a will. One’s directives regarding one’s possessions do not stop at death, or at any rate do not have to stop at that point.
In the US that is emphatically incorrect right now because we have an opt-in, not an opt-out, system. Other nations, obviously, do things differently.
That is not arbitrary, it follows specific rules and laws. No one goes to deceased person’s bank account, says, “oh, I’ll have $130, please” and gets it without some sort of proof they have legal ability to do so. Probate and the like take time, that that would be prohibitive for recovering any sort of viable organ and, unlike withdrawing money from an estate, can not be reversed.
The question is whether or not society feels entitled to a deceased person’s body parts or not. This may shock the pro-donation crowd, but quite a few people still think the practice of harvesting organs for donation is ghoulish. Many people are emotionally upset at the notion of a body being disfigured or cut apart. Some religions prohibit or strongly discourage autopsies, for example. Are you going to run roughshod over their beliefs and emotions or not? Then there’s the opposite extreme, where people feel the estates of donors should benefit from the donation (I call that the Ferengi Approach).
When these threads come up on this site I see a lot of people piling on about how everyone should be gung-ho for organ donation and anyone not that way is being selfish/greedy/foolish/ignorant/whatever. Problem is, not everyone in the world agrees with you.
People opposed to opt-out systems are opposed to them not because opting out is difficult, but because they fear that either their opt-out will be ignored (because society feels their organs belong to society, not to the individuals whose organs they are/were) or that doctors will be less likely to try to save their lives in order to get their organs (this is not uncommon among minorities and, sad to say, in the US that notion is not entirely without merit due to historical abuses), or that, since the default is “harvest organs”, if there’s any sort of delay in communicating their wishes (say they suffer a devastating accident in a distant city and their records regarding opting out aren’t accessed or are delayed in being communicated) their organs will be taken anyway against their wishes.
I wrote a long post in reply to this, but decided to just shorten it much more instead - your organs decay and go to waste if they aren’t donated immediately, whereas your money stays intact and doesn’t. The situations are very, very, different, not just for the reasons mentioned above, but others as well.
Yes, and so would a opt out organ donation system.
I dont give a fuck if anyone’s “wishes” will be ignored… since all those wishes are based upon irrational choices. And of course, if they are going to ignore "wishes’ they could do so with a “opt in” system too- liek just pasting a little red dot on a drivers license.
as for the paranoia, I already answered that : "Sure, but then, just as likely, you’d get a Medical Professional that will go: “This asshole didnt even care enough to make himself a donor, why should I bust my ass trying to get him a new heart?”
Perhaps, in the strict sense of “own”, but neither does the government or health care system - ever. A person or their designee(s) does, however, have very broad dominion over their own body. In the case of death the one authorized to handle the disposal of the body is generally the executor of the estate. In the case where there is no family and no will the state takes the role of executor, but that determination comes long after organs would be no longer viable.
I am an organ donor. I wish everyone were. Simply put, though, opt out organ donation has no basis in common law at all.
Snide answer:
Fine, but none of this solves the even more common problem of abandoned pianos.
Real life experience:
When I was getting my first driver’s license, way back in the day, the gentleman in front of me was asked “Would you like to be an organ donor?”. He didn’t understand the concept and when it was explained to him his eyes grew as wide as saucers and he said “Oh, no! You can have whatever you want off my motorcycle, but leave me in peace!”
And that is a big problem with your side of the argument, that “I don’t give a fuck what you think, give me your organs” attitude. People who were already leery of organ donation will view you with deep, dark suspicion and fight you harder when you lash out with that attitude. That is not how you’re going to win people over. And if you say you don’t care about winning people over what are you going to do, take body parts by force?
Minority groups in the US already have that suspicion, that they won’t get equal treatment, equal care, that their lives will not be viewed as being as valuable as someone from the majority. It has all sorts of impacts, including the prolongation of dying via futile methods because some people are so afraid that they will be discarded.
A nation like France does not have that problem. They did not have J. Marion Sims using black women as lab rats when developing new surgical techniques, operating scores of times on the same women, without anesthesia even though by that time it did exist and he used it when operating on white women. They didn’t have the Tuskegee syphilis study. The fact that white people are far more likely to find a donor match than black people in the US only adds fuel to the ethical concern fire. Now, there are reasons why that is so that have nothing to do with bigotry but rather are based on both biology and sheer numbers of each respective group, but to say that such concerns are irrational is to ignore the history of bigotry and discrimination in this country and their long term effects. It is NOT irrational for black people to distrust that they are getting equal treatment in medical matters because there is ample evidence that both history and in the present there has been and can be bias against them.
Do I, personally, believe that there are mustache-twirling villains in the organ donation system intent on snatching organs out of black people and giving them to white people? No, I don’t. But there is a concern that one group is going to benefit more than than another. I have heard concerns that with so many young black men in the US dying by violence they’ll wind up providing a disproportionate share of the organs, but not receive a comparable number for needy members of their race/ethnicity. You do understand why they might not want to be compelled to give over their organs when they don’t expect to enjoy reciprocity?
(In actual fact, for many organs it’s unlikely they’d cross racial lines. Not impossible, but unlikely. It varies from organ to organ, but one reason black/Asian/multi-racial Americans are less likely to match with a donor is because the best matches are usually first within family, then within blood relatives, then within the same ethnic group. There are still more white people in sheer numbers than black people in the US, which means a larger pool of potential matches exist for any random white person vs. any random black person. “Black” people who happen to have a lot of European ancestry are more likely to match with a white person than someone with predominantly or wholly African ancestry. It’s also why some white people match with “black” people. These are biological realities and not due to human prejudices.)
(That’s not even getting into religious issues which, even if the majority of the board here think are stupid/irrational/whatever are taken seriously enough by other people that they’re willing to fight and die over much smaller matters than organ swapping.)
But that’s exactly what we do in that example. Autopsies are often mandatory. We’ve decided that, in certain cases, cutting apart a body to find out what happened inside is more important than following the wishes of the deceased.
Yes, sometimes we make an autopsy mandatory, but in most instances they are not. We at least consider the question. Families can challenge the necessity of an autopsy to a criminal investigation and insist the least intrusive form of exam be used. They can also require that all organs must be returned to the body prior to final disposition.
So while the legal authorities have some rights to insist on autopsies that is not an unlimited right.
I don’t understand that part, but IANAL and anyway my country isn’t common law, there are a lot of things about both law in general and common law in particular I don’t understand. What kind of basis would you expect? Is there anything in common law that not only doesn’t provide a “basis” for opt out, but actually pushes against it?
Spain’s own process for going opt-out began with a petition from the citizens of a Foral Law area which already had the highest donation indices of the country; we basically wanted to simplify or get rid of the paperwork needed to opt in or for the family of someone who hadn’t done the paperwork to donate for the deceased, and the option our legislature chose was the second one. The system went smoothly enough that the rest of the country (which is not Foral Law) decided it was a good idea and took it up.