3 ms·
The linked article suggests that the federal government would be a monopsony buyer in the US kidney market. My understanding is that most serious policy proposa
by intuitionist 3y ago
The linked article suggests that the federal government would be a monopsony buyer in the US kidney market. My understanding is that most serious policy proposals along these lines would have the same feature. Medicare already covers care for nearly all US citizens with severe chronic kidney disease; paying for kidney donations would move some number of patients from dialysis to transplant but they wouldn’t be out of pocket.
- keybored 3y agoI don’t see how that solves the potential problem. You could still end up in the same place of “balancing out” where the extra money from your kidney becomes something you need i.e. a transfer from poor to rich people.
- intuitionist 3y agoWell, the people receiving the kidneys won’t be rich on average, although it’s possible they’ll be richer on average than the compensated donors. There’s a big shortfall of available kidneys but the number is pretty tiny compared to the number of people living paycheck-to-paycheck in America. So it seems unlikely to me that in the future everyone needs to donate a kidney just to stay in the same place—that’d be a couple orders of magnitude more kidneys than we need.
- keybored 2y agoFair point that there isn’t a high enough demand to cause a lot of poor people to be monokidneys.