That is the proposal being considered in the South Carolina Senate. Prisoners would receive up to 180 days of time served for donating an organ or bone marrow. The following exchange of quotes from an A.P. article pretty much sums up the positions of nearly every debate over how organ donation should be incentivized:
Mary Jo Cagle, chief medical officer of Bon Secours St. Francis Health System in Greenville, urged senators to find an allowable incentive. “We have a huge need for organs and bone marrow,” Cagle said.
But Melissa Blevins, executive director of Donate Life South Carolina, said any incentive would break the law and the principle behind donations. “It really muddies the water about motive. We want to keep it a clearly altruistic act,” she said.
As we argued here, the current system of treating organ donations as a “clearly altruistic act” clearly isn’t working very well. This is pointed out in the final sentence of the A.P. article:
More than 95,300 Americans are awaiting an organ transplant, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. About 6,700 die each year.
The biggest recent news on the organ transplant front is a proposal spelled out in a fascinating Wall Street Journal article in which the United Network for Organ Sharing would radically shift the way it rations donated kidneys. Instead of awarding kidneys based primarily on a recipient’s time spent on the waiting list, the new UNOS plan would factor in the recipient’s age. Younger recipients would get preference over older patients, the idea being that a new organ is more valuable to a younger person with more years to live.
FWIW, here are a variety of our earlier posts on the subject.
(Hat tip: Rian Stockbower)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Last time I made this suggestion on another forum I was horrendously flamed, but I’m a glutton for punishment so I’ll say it again: the only real long-term and humane solution to the shortage of organs for transplant is figuring out how to stop so many organs from failing in the first place. Some cases are unavoidable, of course, but I’m certain that more research and more preventitive medicine could help reduce the rates of organ failure.
Flame away.
Last time I made this suggestion on another forum I was horrendously flamed, but I’m a glutton for punishment so I’ll say it again: the only real long-term and humane solution to the shortage of organs for transplant is figuring out how to stop so many organs from failing in the first place. Some cases are unavoidable, of course, but I’m certain that more research and more preventitive medicine could help reduce the rates of organ failure.
Flame away.
Prosa, I do not think this forum is much for flames, but I could be wrong. Preventing organ failure is clearly a primary goal, but such failures are caused by many things, many of which are not preventable in the sense you mean. Liver damage from poisoning is a good example. Others are related to diseases that are not well under control either (e.g. diabetes, some Hepatitis forms, etc).
The real long-term solution, other than prevention, is growing organs in the lab or in the body. This is coming, but not for a while; stem cells are the most likely way forward, but it takes lot of testing before we have a standard therapy.
In the mean time, the question is an ethical and societal one involving the best way to get organs donated by the survivors of the recently deceased, and secondarily from living donors. The recent focus on living donors is in large part due to the problems of getting families to allow recovery from the recently deceased. If this societal problem could be resolved, there would be a large enough supply for the demand.
Prosa, I do not think this forum is much for flames, but I could be wrong. Preventing organ failure is clearly a primary goal, but such failures are caused by many things, many of which are not preventable in the sense you mean. Liver damage from poisoning is a good example. Others are related to diseases that are not well under control either (e.g. diabetes, some Hepatitis forms, etc).
The real long-term solution, other than prevention, is growing organs in the lab or in the body. This is coming, but not for a while; stem cells are the most likely way forward, but it takes lot of testing before we have a standard therapy.
In the mean time, the question is an ethical and societal one involving the best way to get organs donated by the survivors of the recently deceased, and secondarily from living donors. The recent focus on living donors is in large part due to the problems of getting families to allow recovery from the recently deceased. If this societal problem could be resolved, there would be a large enough supply for the demand.
prosa – Why do you think the two are mutually exclusive? Organ markets and medical advances on the front of healthcare go together. It’s a sterile argument – we live in a world in which people demand kidneys and which people would be willing to sell them at a price. What you’re saying is we need to reduce demand, which is true, of course. But presently, there is a shortage that causes thousands of deaths, and these could be alleviated at enormously low cost to society by allowing exchanges to occur between the interested parties. That is not at odds with also continuing R&D investment to reduce demand.
prosa – Why do you think the two are mutually exclusive? Organ markets and medical advances on the front of healthcare go together. It’s a sterile argument – we live in a world in which people demand kidneys and which people would be willing to sell them at a price. What you’re saying is we need to reduce demand, which is true, of course. But presently, there is a shortage that causes thousands of deaths, and these could be alleviated at enormously low cost to society by allowing exchanges to occur between the interested parties. That is not at odds with also continuing R&D investment to reduce demand.
It came out in the WS Journal, thus, it must be true and sound.
.lermit
It came out in the WS Journal, thus, it must be true and sound.
.lermit