Economics that Matters: Using the Tax System to Solve the Shortage of Human Organs

Although most people are unaware of it, the world faces a critical shortage. There are too few organ donors. Every hour, one American and one European die for want of a transplant donor. Yet in principle there are enough natural (though tragically untimely) deaths to provide sufficient donors for our citizens. New ideas are therefore essential: we have to find a way to match supply with demand. While this is a complicated and sensitive area of human life, it would be sensible for our nations to offer a small tax incentive to those willing to carry a donation card and act as potential organ donor in the event of their own death. This is an economic approach. But it could solve a medical problem. There is clear need. In the United Kingdom, for instance, approximately 6000 people are waiting at any one time for transplants of major organs – especially kidney, pancreas, heart, lung, liver. Underlying demand is even larger than this suggests. If the supply of organs were greater, the official waiting-list figure would be longer. Around 3000 transplants are done each year in the UK. In the United States, at any time 70,000 men and women are waiting for a transplant of a major body organ. The annual number of transplants in the US is only approximately 20,000. Clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with the matching of supply and demand. The National Kidney Foundation of the USA estimates that 50 Americans die each week for want of a kidney donor alone.