To answer the Q of the OP, you can’t get much money for them these days. . .because everyone wants synthesizers instead.
Ray (outta tune, as usual)
We had a thread about this before, and then (as now) I recommend you check out:
http://www.unos.org
They (United Network for Organ Sharing) are the organization that coordinates all organ transplants in the US, and they have a lot of FAQs about organ theft, and other issues that come up a lot when dealing with issues of donation.
The two main problems with selling your organs ahead of time are:
-
As already mentioned, the organ bank might pay you only to find out later your organs are unusable because of cancer, or hey, how about you were flattened by a semi and your liver looks like sausage filler?
-
You might have perfectly good organs but not die in a place where the organs can be instantly accessed. You generally have to remove the organs immediately after death or necrosis sets in. So even in a perfect world, you may live with someone and have perfectly healthy organs, but when you slip and fall in the shower, crack your skull open, and your significant other doesn’t find you until they come home from work 8 hours later, the organs are already unusable.
The most obvious drawback will be the existance of a black market. If people can make a profit selling organs, then they’ll do various things to increase that profit – and the most obvious way is to find ways to get more raw material. You would quickly find people who would approach potential recipients and ask what it’s worth to them to get a new heart. If they’re willing to pay enough, a heart will be “found.”
There’d be no sure way to prevent this. If organs become a commodity, then they will be treated as such. It probably wouldn’t increase the number of willing donors all that much, but will sure as hell increase the number of unwilling ones.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
Yeah, there was this Robin Cook novel where a mobster used massive cocaine overdoses to kill healthy young people who were on file as donors at a Organ Bank in order to speed up his getting corneal transplants. Pretty scary…
<jk>
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Unfortunatly, Chuck, said black market already exists. I saw a feature on some magazine show that I can’t remember at the moment (damm aluminum pots…I have got to start writing this stuff down), interviewing a man in California who made his living as an organ broker, finding organs in foriegn countries for wealthy recipients in the U.S.
Interestingly, I also saw something else about organ donation that indicated that most medical students do not carry donor cards, and the tone of the piece suggested they did not for fear of organs being harvested before the donor was, technically, dead.
The organ donation system in this country is not nearly as pure, altruistic and even-handed as The United Network for Organ Sharing would have you believe, and, as I said before, I believe it really comes down to whether or not people have a right to do as they please with their own bodies.
I think I saw that feature, Lucretia. Apparently, it’s not at all unheard of for black marketers to kidnap homeless people in SE Asia. They’re not heard from again, but their kidneys and livers are. 
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Lucretia posts:
I suspect that you’re right, Lucretia - that most medical students do not carry organ donor cards. But for this stat to have meaning, we would have to know how many 21-26 year olds (typical med student age) in the general population DO carry organ donor cards. Only after one finds a statistically significant variation in the rate of organ donor card carrying in 21-26 yo med students vs all 21-26 yo in this country can one reasonably start hypothesizing about why the difference occurs.
This is further distorted by not defining “organ donor card”. AFAIK, I do not carry an organ donor card. I carry a TX state DL with an X in the organ donor box, and all of my family know my desires regarding this, but if asked if I carried an organ donor card would say no, meaning that I haven’t officially registered with any organ bank, been pre-typed, or done anything more than X’d the box on my DL.
Stories like this do a tremendous mount of harm by using innuendo to suggest that people “in the know” distrust the system, and are reluctant to donate. Please don’t circulate it unless you know the facts behind it.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
I take anticonvulsants for a seizure disorder, and this alone precludes me from being a blood and/or organ donor. Dunno if it’s because of the meds or the seizures.
I suggest reading a pretty good short story by Larry Niven called “The Jigsaw Man”.
FixedBack
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”~~*G.K.Chesterton *
I’d have to say one of the major drawbacks would be the temptation to keep the goods on the shelf after the “sell-by” date expires.
It is being reported that the Chinese are selling livers extracted from executed prisoners:
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=123832
Krispy Original – voted SDMB’s 19th most popular poster (1999)
There has been some boo-hooing over Too Many Patients - Not Enough Organs.
As pointed out the receiver gets a chance at a better life, the physicians and hospitals and drug companies make a hefty profit, but the MOST Essential participant gets nothing.
Of course I would not personally benefit from someone’s paying for my organs. However I want my family to benefit financially.
To illustrate how stupid I was I actually donated blood and platelets for five years. All I ever got was a glass of tomato juice and a cracker.
In Virginia blood donors are paid $130.00 for each donation.
Along with other suckers I was supporting a million dollar industry and getting naught but a sappy letter telling me how noble it is to save a life.
That could be true, I still prefer money. A unit of blood costs hospitals $79.00.
A unit of platelets sells for $444.00. I deserve at least one half of that amount.
Hence I will no longer donate blood.
I will also refuse to let any of my family members be harvested for organs.
Selfish? You bet. I am a mercenary. Like all other people I put my interests first, I just admit it.
So all of you organ banks, pony up $100,000.00 each for a kidney, and $250,000.00 for my heart.
That is more motivation than thinking about being noble. Being noble doesn’t benefit my brother the way a huge chunk of tax free cash will.
Besides it’s my body, and my organs, I should be allowed to sell to the highest bidder.
lindsay
Lindsay, one better, you could get your money for your organs now under something like a life insurance plan in reverse. You get paid now, you pay up when you die and your organs are no longer useful.
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
–Lyndon B. Johnson
Don’t see how that would work out.
Anyway, I have this fear that if I ever agreed to be an organ donor, and someone needed my tissue type, I’d be found in a shallow grave with surgical incisions on my body.
Harold Klawans, M.D, a Neurologist at Rush Hospital in Chicago wrote about a patient who was in a car crash, he was mute, but could hear. Because he could not speak and had suffered a mild concussion, the medics assumed he was near death.
That 26 year old man got to hear those ghouls discussing harvesting his heart as soon as they got to the medical center. Fortunately his fiancee was with him, and told the doctors he wasn’t unconscious, he just was a mute.
Dr. Klawans said the poor guy was afraid to fall asleep.
Dr. Klawans also described the surgeons being very angry and demanding that he give up on the young man so they could do the heart transplant.
What do you know, when Dr. Klawans was taken off the team to treat the young man, he died of unknown causes and his heart was taken.
I will never go into any hospital without my attorney’s knowledge and will have someone with me 24/7.
I work in claims, you would not want to believe what some of these physicians do, and get away with.
lindsay
It really isn’t any of your damned business what your family members do if they express a wish to be donors. Get over yourself.
According to the newpaper, there are too many patients and not enough organs. The figures given are that 68,000 ill people need organ transplants, the number of organs donated remains at 17,000 annually and that more than 4,800 of these seriously ill patients die each year as a result of this scarcity.
For a country with close to 270 million people, it seem obvious not many people are motivated to being a donor.
How could offering financial incentives adversely affect this already small number?
Hasn’t this ad campaign to sign a donor card been going on for years? It doesn’t seem to be working.
Maybe offering money would make more organs available.
lindsay
A family members’ wishes become your business if you are the surviving nearest relative.
When you die, your estate passes onto the next of kin. That person has the legal right to decide how to handle said estate.
As my siblings have not mentioned this, I can only assume there is no desire to become a donor.
Hence I would do what I think they would have wanted.
lindsay
You raise an interesting problem. Who would want to pay for organs, not knowing what condition they would be in upon delivery? ( this whole thread is somewhat horrifying, but what the hell). If I sold things from inside, then discovered the joys of crack cocaine, for example...well...how do you enforce a breach of contract like this?
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.