I continue the excerpts from my Medical Self-Defense article, by rebutting arguments that banning payment for organs is necessary to avoid very grave harms. In this post, I deal with the arguments that banning payment is needed to keep rich patients from "jumping the queue." I've already discussed the risk of organ robbery; in future posts, I deal with the arguments that banning payment is needed to keep poor providers from being improperly exploited, or to avoid supposedly inherently improper "commodification" of the human body.

As before, please recall that the footnotes are available here, so if you wonder where I got some of the data, you might check there first.

[C]onsider the concern that allowing payment for organs would let rich patients buy up all available organs, and leave poorer patients without the chance of a transplant. This result can similarly be avoided with regulation rather than prohibition.

Organ transplants are expensive. They are already available only to those who have health insurance, government-provided health care, or their own funds. All people, rich or poor, who are up for transplants thus already have some health care funders paying for their care.

And long-term care used while transplants are unavailable is even more expensive than transplants; for kidneys, transplants cost on average about $100,000 less than long-term dialysis. Health care funders would save money by paying up to $100,000 per kidney, again whether the patient is rich or poor. This means we can still maintain the current need-based system, but just have the health care funder for each person who's next in line pay for the person's new organ; the result will likely be savings for the funders, a greater pool of available organs, and no extra advantage for the rich.

Even if for some organ, transplants wouldn't save money, and the health care funder would have to pay $30,000 per organ to compensate providers, this will hardly be a huge burden to absorb. Each year, about 15,000 Americans are added to the nonkidney transplant waiting lists; even if that number doubles once organs becomes more available, that would still only constitute .012% of the 250 million Americans with health insurance. If each organ cost $30,000, and this price wasn't offset by any savings in alternative treatment costs, this would mean an increase in insurance costs of $4 per year per insured.

The "rich outbidding others" concern only arises if (1) the rich or their insurers pay so much that other health care funders can't keep up, and (2) the other funders' payments don't suffice to make enough organs available for all patients. Even if we think this is likely -- if we think the rich would pay $200,000 per kidney, other health care funders wouldn't pay more than $100,000, and this payment wouldn't yield enough organs for everyone -- this only supports capping payments at the level that all funders would pay, likely the level at which they'll still be saving money by getting an organ instead of paying for long-term dialysis.

Of course, even the lesser burden created by a payment cap may still be substantial, if the capped payment yields fewer organs and thus leaves some extra people on the waiting list. And this burden may be improper if we conclude that preventing inequality isn't reason enough to interfere with medical self-defense. Where other matters -- private schooling, hiring a criminal lawyer, most forms of free speech, hiring of guards, spending money on highest-quality medical care -- are concerned, we generally don't have the government impose such payment caps, despite egalitarian concerns.

Part of the reason for this is a general respect for property rights, notwithstanding the inequality they necessarily cause, and the view that substantive rights (to educate one's children, speak, get an abortion, or hire a lawyer) include the right to spend money to exercise the right. And part is the fact that there'll be much less provision of valuable services, such as education, legal assistance, or medical care, if those services must be provided subject to a price cap. Equality achieved by leveling everyone down to the same low protection is often, at least in the organ transplant context, the equality of the graveyard.

Nonetheless, perhaps I'm wrong: Perhaps the interest in keeping the rich from getting preferential access to organs is strong enough to trump the medical self-defense right, and would therefore justify barring rich patients from paying extra for such organs. But this equality interest can justify only a cap on payments to organ providers, not the much more burdensome total ban on such payments.