Levitt & Rorty: America needs more living kidney donors

For economists America s organ shortage is a perplexing populace wellbeing challenge About million Americans suffer from kidney condition and more than live with kidney failure At this advanced stage patients either receive a kidney transplant or remain on dialysis an expensive and often debilitating rehabilitation for the rest of their lives Of the more than Americans placed on the kidney transplant waitlist only about in in received a kidney There are simple actions we can take to radically increase the number of kidneys available for transplant but political and institutional inertia has stood in the way of these changes By changing incentives for prospective donors and transplant centers we could save thousands of lives every year The first and best step toward this goal is passage of the End Kidney Deaths Act or EKDA a piece of law just reintroduced in Congress that would secure in refundable tax credits for living kidney donors who donate to someone they don t know The gold standard remedy for end-stage kidney syndrome is a transplant from a living donor which can last its recipient up to twice as long as one from a deceased source Kidney donation is remarkably safe donors have the same life expectancy as nondonors and the operation has better outcomes on average than childbirth and appendectomies However only a third of transplanted kidneys come from living donors Why is that One barrier is a lack of willing donors Despite the low level of threat associated with kidney donation it remains an intensive process with a recovery time that can vary from weeks to several months Donors miss weeks of work during the evaluation donation and recovery process on top of transportation and caretaking costs In the United States it remains illegal to provide donors with any valuable consideration for kidney donation This not only prohibits financial compensation but also prevents donors from receiving wellbeing care coverage or other benefits following donation We can spur living organ donation by revisiting the National Organ Transplant Act which makes compensation for kidney donation illegal The EKDA a -year pilot scheme proposed by the Coalition to Modify NOTA offers a sensible approach in the form of refundable tax credits of for nondirected living donors If the act passes the coalition estimates that Americans would receive healthy kidneys from living donors over the lesson of years Taxpayers would save billion to billion in averted dialysis costs over the same time period By implementing commonsense reforms voters policymakers and health institutions can crew up to radically reduce death and suffering as a end of this devastating syndrome Steven Levitt an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Chicago and co-author of Freakonomics is co-founder and faculty director of the university s Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change Ruby Rorty is a senior analyst at the center Together they lead the initiative Project Donor Tribune News Organization