Matt Welch makes the case for ending the prohibition on selling of kidneys:
Every day, eighteen people die in the United States while waiting in vain for a kidney transplant according to the National Kidney Foundation. The Department of Health & Human Services reports that nearly 92,000 patients were on the kidney waiting list as of April 6 (up from 66,000 six years ago), but that only 16,812 transplants were made in 2011. That deadly math is part of the reason that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 380,000 Americans are on dialysis, a punitively expensive and physically grueling death-postponement procedure. The imbalance cannot be meaningfully addressed via cadaver-harvesting alone. As the writer (and kidney donor) Virginia Postrel observed in 2009:
If every single person who died the right way became an organ donor, an optimistic estimate would be that 7,000 more kidneys a year would be available for transplant. Since the [waiting] list is now increasing by 6,000 a year, that would be enough to end it—in 80 years.
So we know that maintaining prohibition—letting the law be guided by our moral revulsion toward placing price tags on human organs—will certainly increase the body count. We know that boosting the number of kidney donations from the living is the only real way to whittle the waiting list down. And we also know, from such procedures as egg donation, that legalizing monetary rewards is a guaranteed method for expanding the pool of living donors. Your morality may vary, but mine says that sentencing more than 6,000 people a year to an avoidable death falls well short of the Golden Rule.
I agree.
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