In The National Review, Caleb Petit has a piece on The Fiscal Consequences of Banning Compensation To Organ Donors:
Could lifting restrictions on organ sales help ease the burden of America’s current fiscal crisis? Surprisingly, allowing kidney donors to get paid, even through the form of tax benefits, for their donation could have a significant impact on federal spending. The federal government pays a significant share of the costs involved in providing dialysis, and nearly half of all patients on dialysis use Medicare. . . .
American taxpayers spent about $39 billion on dialysis alone in 2019, making up 4.9 percent of Medicare’s expenditures and roughly 0.9 percent of total federal expenditures in 2019. Dialysis has not been cheap for the American taxpayer. . . .
The only way to get someone off of dialysis is for them to get a kidney transplant. . . .
In 2024, the bipartisan End Kidney Deaths Act was introduced to Congress, and the bill was reintroduced this year. If passed, it would grant a fully refundable $50,000 tax credit to undirected living kidney donors (meaning that the recipient is not specified) in 5 annual $10,000 increments, which could go a long way in encouraging living kidney donations. As long as the average wait time for a kidney fell by just six months, the program would pay for itself.
Read the whole thing here.
But to really dig into the numbers, I recommend Ending the Kidney Shortage with Frank McCormick on the Taboo Trades podcast, and his article, Projecting the Economic Impact of Compensating Living Kidney Donors in the United States: Cost-Benefit Analysis Demonstrates Substantial Patient and Societal Gains, co-authored with Philip J. Held, Glenn Chertow, Thomas G. Peters, and John P. Roberts. It is published in the journal, Value in Health and is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152201957X/
The episode is also embedded below (and available on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere).