NYC Has Some Brass Ones, Let Me Tell You.

You have to have a thick skin to live in NYC.  If not, the City will eat you alive.  I've seen it, many, many times, and it isn't pretty.  Relating this phenomenon to organ donation happened today.  Recently, NYC realized that 7800 residents need organs.  Six hundred and eighty two of them get an organ each year. (Um, yes, I thank my lucky stars I'm one of the few).  As I've spoken about before, hundreds of people die waiting.  And so, home to many creative and assertive people, NYC has come up with a plan that only NYC can come up with.

To try to improve those numbers, New York City is starting a pilot program in which, for the next five months, an organ-recovery team will trail ambulances responding to 911 calls, ready to leap in if the patient dies and is a viable donor. It’s a bold experiment: no other American city has even tried it. Yet officials have already warned that the program, financed with a $1.5 million grant, might not yield a single kidney.

Ariel Kardinier, Organ Donation, Let the Market Rule?, N.Y.T., Dec. 10, 2010.

I anxiously await the outcomes of that program because, to me, it just sounds ... pretty ballsy.  Read the whole article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/nyregion/12critic.html?_r=1&ref=health

The article goes on to discuss the idea of selling organs on the free market and how "it couldn't possibly be open to corruption."  We've also discussed this idea here before.  Even though I think this is eventually where we will be headed as a society, I think that, of course, such a system is open to corruptions and of course it will muscle with the poor, middle class, and even working upper class out of the equation.  If anyone reading this supports the selling of organs, it will only take one dying relative or friend and the lack of a few hundred thousand dollars to change your mind.