The prospect of dying for want of a kidney has concentrated Sally Satel’s mind wonderfully on how to make sure that more kidneys become available. She comes down in favor of incentive payments to donors, and suggests 4 basic models:

1. A forward market for cadaver organs (I like this one) in which you sign up to have your organs harvested at death, and receive a small payment on signing or a large one to your estate when you die
2. A centralized single compensator. Medicare or whoever pays a bounty for the kidney; and pays $15-20k a year for the immunosuppressant drugs which the recipient will need; but saves $66k per patient per year on dialysis.
3. Multiple compensators. As above, but private insurers and charitable foundations chip into the compensation fund.
4. Private contracts. The sort of market we have now, between individuals, only regulated and legal. One nice nuance, suggested by Ms Postrel’s husband, is that donors/vendors should get a year’s tax holiday, evening out the incentive between rich and poor.

2007-03-14: iran, of all places, might be the first place with an organ market.
2011-05-31:

Scott Carney’s The Red Market is a book-length investigative journalism piece on the complicated and sometimes stomach-churning underground economy in human flesh, ranging from practice of kidnapping children to sell to orphanages who get healthy kids to pass off to wealthy foreigners to the bizarre criminal rings who imprison kidnapped indigents in “blood farms” or lure impoverished women into selling their kidneys.

the trade in human flesh is brisk.
2016-12-30: Car crash victims are a major source of organ donations. What will replace them? Better stock up on those artificial organs.

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