Because some people who might otherwise recover will die.
Such crimes are very hard to detect. Just ask the victims of Dr Shipman - he was only caught when he got greedy.
I have no doubt that they do not actually charge for the organs but charge for the various services surrounding the transplant. Organ preservation, transportation, the procedure itself, the facilities (i.e. hospital), etc. etc. While they do not charge the patient for the actual organ those who provide the above services are still making a profit off of the organs. Any claims that organs have no monetary value are false. Why shouldn’t my family be able to profit from the use of my organs after death? Funerals are expensive.
Because I don’t believe the default position of the state should be that they have dibs on your body. Whether or not a body is property it implies that we somehow belong to the state which is what I find disturbing.
Quite frankly, I’m not even sure the government has the authority to automatically claim domain over human remains. Regulating the handling of human remains for safety isn’t in the same boat as harvesting organs in my opinion.
Quick question. When you receive blood during a surgery or medical emergency are you charged per unit/pint/litre? The people who donate aren’t compensated (except for cookies, fruit juice, and possibly a warm feeling of helping others).
I will have to say that organs have monetary value to *some *people or else there wouldn’t be a market for them, however black that market may be. AFAIK the reason there is a black market is because organs are so hard to get. If supply goes way up, shouldn’t the market go down?
“The family” is not some distinct entity with a united view. When you die without a will, who gets your property? Not necessarily “the family”. Depending on your locality, it could default to certain descendant(s), may require court action, etc. Again, you seem to be making a lot of assumptions about property transfer at death even if we grant your incorrect belief that a corpse is treated the same as other property.
The biggest assumption you’re making is that property automatically transfers to some ill-defined “the family” when someone dies. Even hardcore libertarians should be for some kind of legal framework to set guidelines of how property transfers at death in the case of someone without a will, which means a law stating your organs get donated unless you opt out shouldn’t be an issue. Most other inheritance laws would be difficult to apply to a corpse and its organs since organs are only good for donation within very small time windows and it is difficult to divide a corpse or organs between family members.
While it’s always a possibility when humans are involved that some will be unethical monsters…I think you’re underestimating a doctor’s desire to “win”. Doctors hate “losing” patients (see- it’s right there in the term) and will more often do MORE than most of us would really approve of if we were truly informed to save a life, not less. I think a far more realistic concern is doctors doing too much to save a life not worth living, rather than getting excited over salvaging organs.
PLUS, if organ donation were not so rare, organs would not be such a scarce resource. That would seem to lead to less over-enthusiastic organ harvesting, since the doctor won’t feel that this is his other patient’s only chance at a good match. Thousands of people die every day - having access to those thousands of organs makes this one here less critical to get.
I think the concrete harm isn’t to the dead body, but possibly to the family involved. While I agree with opt-out as a model, I do think that the grieving family should be able to opt-out post-mortem. Especially if the numbers of donors vastly increases with an opt-out model, as predicted, I see no reason to torture the grieving who may view organ donation as immoral, against their religious views, or simply just “too icky to contemplate” during a time when the stress is greatest in their lives.
Yes, I would hope that people will communicate their wishes to their families, and that families honor those wishes. But at the end of the day, dead Aunt Edna won’t be harmed if I don’t actually scatter her ashes in the ocean or we play rock music at the viewing, nor will she be harmed if she wanted to donate her organs and we don’t do it. Uncle Ernie, on the other hand, might suffer severe emotional trauma at the idea of his precious wife “carved up” after her death, and Uncle Ernie, being alive, is the one I’m concerned about at that point.
No slippery slope, just practical concern for reduction of harm to living individuals, leads me to support an opt-out system with that opt-out being extended to the next of kin post-mortem.
This can happen even without organ donation.
I don’t think that the family should be able to opt-out if the deceased has made his/her wishes known. Yes, the family is probably in shock, but that’s precisely why they shouldn’t make a decision right then and there, with Aunt Edna cooling down in the next room. Edna had thought about her decision, probably for a while. The family needs time, but Edna’s organs don’t have the luxury of time, they’re deteriorating.
I have a use for those photos. Once I’m dead, my family might have a use for those photos.
My organs? Not so much. And there is a legitimate benefit if my organs are used by other people. My photos? Again, not so much.
Two years ago, my wife asked to have a ring made for her birthday- it used the diamond from her engagement ring, and two aquamarines (my birthstone) on either side of it. Every time she looks at it, she’s reminded of me. If I die, I seriously doubt she’ll get rid of it.
shrug
One thing that I’ve noticed in previous threads on this subject is that the people who are most adamant about preventing an opt-out system of organ donation are also adamant that organ donors shouldn’t get sole (or even priority) organ donation, should they need it. So basically, we’ve got people who don’t want to donate organs, but who feel that they should have just as much right to donated organs as those of us who are proactive donors.
Personally, I find this more than a little hypocritical.
On a practical level, going from Opt-in to Opt-out can decrease participation (as apparently happened in Brazil some time ago), if distrust of the medical profession or the state is at a high enough level. cf Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber (the comments are actually worth reading).
I’ve noticed this accusation pops up even when the people who are opposed to an opt-out system say they plan to donate their own organs. 
God almighty! I’m still using my photos! I’m still using my body, for that matter. When I die, though, I am no longer using the body, and honestly, it’s not really of use to anyone else like the pictures might be.
Opt-out is the only way.
Meh. Uncle Ernie will probably suffer even more severe emotional trauma when he finds out that Aunt Edna left three-quarters of her vast fortune to the hot Cuban masseur she’s been seeing for the past eight years rather than to him.
But the law doesn’t set aside Aunt Edna’s wishes for the disposal of her assets (assuming she expressed them in proper legal form when mentally competent to do so) for the sake of the emotional harm they will cause to living individuals. The law just says “tough titties, Ernie” and acts as Edna directed. And so it should in the case of organ donation.
If you think it would be icky for a loved one to have their organs harvested, you should talk to them about that issue and find out what their choice is, and try to argue them out of it if it’s that important to you. But you’re not entitled to veto their choice after they’re dead.
And similarly, if you’re rabidly pro-donation and care passionately about saving lives with organ transplants, that doesn’t entitle you to overrule a relative’s decision not to be a donor. Survivors butt out.
My understanding is that the organ is free, but the operation to remove it, its transportation to the OR, and the operation to put it in are paid for by the recipient - or his insurance. No government.
If your view of the world is that we all do all those little things that we wish we had time to do, then it doesn’t match reality very well. In Nudge Sunstein notes that he has lots of subscriptions to magazines he doesn’t read because they are on automatic renewal and he never gets around to canceling them. The 401K situation, in which people turn down free money because they don’t get around to filling out some paperwork, is another example. I saw one reference that said that 80% of Americans are in favor of donation, but it didn’t give a cite to a study. If this were true, would you withdraw your objection? The real reason to default to opt-out is that it saves lives. A person gets to choose whether or not to donate, which is fine, and can opt-out if he cares enough. The recipient doesn’t get the choice.
The organ donation choice can be reversed also - up to the point you die, of course. But money put into the 401K, though still more or less owned by the person, is now pretty well locked up. If it gets taken out by default, and two years later you decide you really don’t want to have it taken out, you don’t get the money back. In the organ donation case, if you are a donor by default, and two years later wake up and decide you don’t want to be, you lose nothing. So I’d say the 401K default mandate is a far bigger EROSION OF LIBERTY than organ donation.
Before I renewed my license, I might have not opted-in. Now I did. Before I did so explicitly, I wanted to have my organs “harvested” - I’d rather have them cut me up and spread me all around, as John Prine sung. Give my knees to the needy and all that.
That’s true, but we mustn’t forget that there is another party to this situation - the person whose life might be saved by the donated organ.
Religious belief is a fine reason for someone to opt out. However, I’d be mightily annoyed if my wishes as an atheist to donate were countermanded by a religious relative. And I wouldn’t want to do the reverse either - countermand the wishes of a religious relative who did not want to donate since I as an atheist think those reasons are bogus.
It’s not the average doctor that concerns me; it’s the unethical one. Or the faceless beancounter / actuary / computer program at the insurance office. It’s better to remove temptation in the first place.
I’ll thank you not to make a strawman of me in order to attempt to desperately prop ut your clearly fallacious argument, thank you. I never said or implied that a corpse is treated the same as other property, or implied that under current law it is treated the same. (Not that current law matters one tiny whit in a discussion about what should be happening, like the current discussion.)
It’s an obvious fact that a corpse is an object. It’s also obvious that, like all objects, some person or persons or collective entities have various claims of ownership and/or control of the body - as in, it’s obviously property (putting aside the case where nobody and no organization claims it).
Having established that the corpse is property, we now have to decide whose claims on it get to be satisfied, when they conflict. We’ll start by noting that the state is the ultimate decider - if the state decides that we’re going to take your organs out as soon as you get so much as a head cold, then into the chop shop you’ll go. Of course the state needn’t decide to do this; in fact the state has decided to give some consideration to the wishes of various other people, including the dead person themself, oddly enough. Corpses aren’t the only place the state does this; for some reason the state allows and honors “wills”, rather than just seizing everything upon a person’s death.
Having now established the obvious, we can review the situation. Arguments that the person or family don’t own the body are worthless - all ownership is at the whim of the state so there’s nothing magic about the body that makes it ‘less owned’ than anything else. Whether the state should seize your organs or your assets or your family pictures or your children is something that can be debated, but not based on the premise that people can’t own corpses, because that’s begging the question.
Trying to argue that “the family” is ill-defined and thus has no rights to anything is, of course, absurd.
The point that there is very little time to decide is, of course, not absurd - but does not provide agumentive support for opt-out over opt-in, or vice versa; either solution works. It mainly argues against having a long discussion period while the body sits in the freezer, which we can avoid as easily with opt-out or opt-in.
Hmm, looks like when I take out the irrelevent bits, there’s no content left in this post. Which brings us back to what I said before - the pros of opt-out are that it almost certainly guarantees a greater organ harvest and it’s very cheap and easy to implement over other donation encouragment systems, and the cons are that it turns the government into a grave robber. It’s really as simple as that - and let me add that the fact that it’s grave robbery doesn’t necessarily rule it out as a possibility. The government robs the dead already, with inheritance taxes. One could in theory argue that seizing organs could be considered more of the same.
Which is now law? Please provide a cite for this. To my knowledge there is no legal requirement for companies that offer 401k plans in the US for their employees to automatically enroll a new employee into the plan unless that employee opts out. What you describe is a policy option that many companies have adopted, but is not a requirement of law.
I never meant to imply that 401K offering was mandatory. Clearly not. However, the Pension Law removes the reason for opt-in provisions:
From The Wiki entry:
I confess that everything I’ve read in the press - and from Thaler - did not describe the intricacies of this case, and made it sound as if the default was to be set to starting a 401K. I still think that this is effectively the case.
The power of defaults is shown by the fact that if companies make choosing the 401K a default, but also make an elective amount less than maximum the default, 401K contributions can actually decrease.
Okay, thanks for the info.
No, I wouldn’t withdraw my objection, because robbing the graves of 1 in 5 people is still pretty bad. Especially since I think that it would be trivial to accumulate actual individual data about this, which is always better than guessing.
And I think the only reason people argue for opt-out over a forced-opt added onto some existing process (like drivers’ liscences or social security or whatever) is because people specifically want to take organs against people’s will. Which is to say, they prefer to steal the things than ask permission, when they can get away with it, and allowing people to opt out at all is a mere sop to try to shut up the worst of the ‘whiners’ while deterring opt-out as much as they can get away with.
Yeah, yeah. And the real reason to sieze 100% of income after the first $50,000 is to greatly bolster social programs and handouts to the poor. I can support social programs and handouts and even saving lives without deciding that it’s a blanket justification for anything you can think up.
Pretty big caveat, there, eh? The whole point of opt-out, particularly as proposed by the OP where the relatives are barred from having any say, is to get as many people as possible never to choose. That is explicitly the goal. Which makes this whole “you can reverse it - until you die” as disingenuous as hell and about as disgustingly morally bankrupt an argument as I can imagine.
Putting aside the disingenous garbage that any significant percentage of people are seriously going to think about the issue before it’s too late, which is both the necessary foundation of your argument and clearly disproven by evidence, I would agree that the 401K default mandate is also apparently flawed. I would say that, were we interested in justice (to the detriment of simplicity), we would allow an opt-out period for up to say six months after the first statement is delivered, up to which the person can bail, and get precisely the money that was put in on their behalf, back, with the government collecting any profit an eating any loss. (Possibly with a year ban from 401K contribution if you do this, do deter gaming of it - but serious discussion of such a plan is rahter off-topic, so I’ll stop here.)
No, there isn’t another party - the government is standing in for the interests of the theorized patients. What other interest would they have?