Over 120,000 people are on the waiting list for kidney donations. Despite medical professionals urging people to sign up to be an organ donor both in life and when they die, the number of donations is still extremely short of what it would take to make an impact on this crisis. Around four-thousand, five-hundred people die each year due to the lack of donated kidneys. What if we could change this? What if there was a better way to encourage people to donate kidneys? The selling of organs is not only illegal but also extremely unethical because of the sources of some of them (black market human trafficking). However, there may be a better way. While we should still ban the selling of organs, we should offer some form of incentive to encourage …show more content…
Many people may be against giving donors any sort of “reward” for donating an organ because they believe it defaces the value of the human body, but how could anyone possibly see saving a life as an act of demoralization. Using a non-monetary form of incentive and requiring living, breathing donors to donate at a certified facility would help reduce black market organ harvesting. The odds that a gangster or mafia boss would want anything other than money is highly unlikely, so the black market would be severely diminished as a result. Non-monetary incentives would also equally encourage upper class and lower class citizens alike to donate. There would also be specialized post-surgery care for both the person donating the organ and the person receiving the organ to prevent the receiver's body from rejecting the organ and to make sure that the donor heals properly and is able to continue functioning as normal. This is extreamly essential because “many Americans are not inclined to be organ donors because they distrust the U.S. healthcare system, in general, and, in particular, because they are concerned that the health care of potential organ donors might be compromised if their donor status were known” (National Kidney Foundation 221). Before we can even begin to introduce a system of incentives, we need to change the way people view the health care system and show donors that health care officials know what they’re