Yes let us begin the financialization of organs. I wanna meet the grave robber from Repo.

What happened to article heads pretending to care about futurist innovation? I vaguely remember some investment firm bragging about funding the creation of artificially grown organs. That was back during the venture capital, bullshit start up era though, so it was probably all lies, but still! What the fuck do these medical companies do all day besides get glowing write-ups in legacy papers?

I wish this person a very nice ice bath.

Here's an excellent blog post by a kidney donor about the great difficulty involved in donating. There are a lot of barriers making it unnecessarily hard to donate.

"Ghoulish" is a little knee-jerk, don't you think?

The proposed method to incentivize kidney donations seems well thought-out and non-coercive. It is structured in a way that makes it impossible or at least very difficult to sell a kidney as a way to "get rich quick" (get out of debt quick). Because it's awarded as tax credits, impoverished people would have little incentive to sell.

Meanwhile, the kidneys will go disproportionately to the poor and to the disadvantaged, since rich and advantaged people apparently have much less trouble finding volunteer donors.

There is a huge need for kidneys. Kidney failure causes great suffering. Having a second kidney isn't very useful. Why not cautiously incentivize donation?

Edit: I think people aren't realizing these are tax credits. Impoverished people who can't afford necessities won't be able to get any money from this.

Edit (2): Okay so apparently these are refundable tax credits, which rather skews things. But there are apparently a number of other safeguards the proposal would put in place to prevent ghoulish kidney harvesting. I think this proposal should really be taken seriously and considered carefully rather than dismissing it outright as "ghoulish" because it has the potential to save a lot of lives, especially low-income and disadvantaged lives.

So Iran is the only country in the world that legalized the sale of kidneys, and as a result, they don't have any wait lists for kidneys. Regardless of how you feel about it, it's an interesting case study (from an anti-imperialist nation to boot) about the effectiveness of the system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_trade_in_Iran