I wonder about that. Both of the people i know who had a kidney surgically removed (one had a large benign tumor clinging to her kidney, and the other donated his kidney to his adopted sister) developed kidney disease 20 years later, which is farther out than most studies follow, but well within the expected future lifespan of the typical kidney donor.
My late wife lost function in one kidney as the cancer was slowly eating her guts. The loss didn’t really affect her near term, but the docs were clear that were she to live long enough it would become a problem. As sadly expected, she did not live long enough.
You have 2 kidneys.
For me, I’d want the full experience and wake up from surgery in a bathtub full of ice.
I’m not sure, but I think a “refundable” tax credit means that even if your income is so low that you don’t pay taxes (or owe less than 10K), they will give you the cash. So yeah, there are a lot of people out there who will make extremely poor choices for $10,000.
Sounds like a wonnerful idear; sign me up for two donations!..
… 
The good news about doing the double donation for $20K / year is that you will actually get a lifetime income out of it.
This is like saying both rich and homeless people alike have the choice to sleep under bridges if they wish - the financial incentive of $10k to a rich person might as well be zero.
Reported! Trolling
I was wondering about that too. I found a couple of long term follow ups and they didn’t show anything too terrible, but the unknowns would tend to put me off donating to a stranger.
How many homeless people are filing taxes, though?
Sure, but it does mean both rich and poor people can receive the donations, whereas in a free market scenario, the rich would outbid the poor.
I’m sorry, @LSLGuy . It must have been horrible for both of you.
Ah, as in being recipients of the kidney? Yeah, I guess that part could be notionally fair, although in a system where healthcare itself (ie diagnosis of the requirement for a donor kidney) is not freely available to everyone equally, I doubt it would play out that way.
It’s not hard to fill out a tax form if you have no income and no assets. That wouldn’t be a barrier.
I would be in favor of a government program to reimburse living kidney donors for their lost income (medical expenses are already covered). It takes at least a couple months to recover from that surgery, more if you have a physically demanding job. So the financial disincentive to donate is currently quite significant. This would mean that rich donors would get bigger checks than poor ones, but I think in this case that’s a reasonable policy.
During the roughly two decades I was on social security disability. I was not required to file taxes. I don’t remember what year there was an economic stimulus payment to certain people. You had to file taxes to get it. I had no job. It took five minutes to file.
Yeah, I didn’t want to say it would be completely fair since I don’t know how this works in America. Do you get free dialysis even if you don’t have insurance? Can you get on the transplant list? But it wouldn’t be any less fair than existing options.
Don’t you need an address, though? I guess it doesn’t really matter - they could just reject homeless people and anyone else they consider too vulnerable.
I suspect it would turn into a way to pay donors unofficially, the same way it has for surrogate mothers in some places, but it would make sense.
I don’t know for sure about taxes. I work in a virtual call center helping callers apply for and renew medical benefits. We used to handle food stamps as well. For medical assistance and food stamps, we just need an address where we can send mail. The overwhelming majority of homeless applicants did have a designeted address for mail.
This sounds like a case where a murky-and-hard-to-define “distastefulness” could stand in the way of two big problems being solved in a practical way:
- People who desperately need organs finally getting them, and
- People who desperately need money finally getting it.
I’m all in favor of paid organ donation - but I think the offered sum of $50,000 for a kidney is way too little. That’s my sole objection - price. I have no objection on grounds of morality; I think it’s perfectly moral.