I have known several families who have done kidney donation within their family. Being a match and keeping their loved one off the list for donation.
Which got me thinking, should we be able to sell a kidney?
The average wait time for a kidney can be 3-5 years.
Living donor donation is the best and most successful method of organ donation/transplant. Altruistic donation is when a living donor simply wants to give a kidney to anyone that matches their HLA...being paid for that removes the "altruism" of the donation. This is frequently visited and re-visited by organ procurement organizations in an effort to increase the transplantable organ pool. It sounds like a great idea to incentivize donation viz-a-viz paying a donor family except the fear is how did the donor die?? People kill off family members for insurance just think what they would do with a laundry list of organ values. One kidney is just about 250k U.S; if you take into account the cost of the donor management, procurement in the O.R by surgeon(s) and of course, implantation by the recipient team. Insurance foots the bill and medicare/medicaid where and when necessary.