Music for hot organs
Comic strip by: Ciccio De Luca
The Chinese are tremendous. They are providing very strong competition for us. And while we are here trying to defend our T shirts behind quotas and import duties, they manage to sell everything to us.
Currently in London and New York (also in Atlanta and Tampa, still in the USA) it’s possible to visit an exhibition, which displays human bodies and organs for didactic and scientific purposes. The organising company has paid 25 million dollars to get these examples from Chinese universities.
And there’s more. While in Italy you have to wait 3 years for a kidney transplant and in USA you wait 2 years. There are those who can get one straight away in Shanghai by paying 100,000 dollars. With a good broker you can get down to 70,000 dollars. If you consider that every year in China there can be up to 8,000 executions each year, the potential for business is understandable.
Given the scarcity of volunteers in our country, transplant tourism has become an important reality. At this point comes the bright idea of the Nobel prize-winner Gary Becker (even Ciampi conferred on him the Gold Medal in 2004): “Let’s legalise the market for organs”.
This Chicago professor is the main supporter of the extension of economic concepts to the analysis of society, from criminality to the family.
Together with a colleague from Buffalo, Julio J. Elias, he has calculated that today the price of a kidney could be about 15,000 dollars, and a liver 35,000 dollars.
As Becker says, with the right incentives we could get a free market in which the price of organs would come down to a level that would eliminate the excess demand for each type of organ.
Our grandparents used to say that the most important thing is health. Among the developed countries, after Lithuania, the United States has the worst rate of infant mortality in the first days of life. Italy is at the other end of the scale. And the lack of health insurance causes 18,000 deaths. Notice that 46 million citizens of the United States are without health cover.
This America of Mr Bush doesn’t seem to be the best place in the world to live, even though there they at least know how much you are worth, at least once you are dead.
Posted by Beppe Grillo at 09:26 PM in Economics
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The outright bias against using market to help relieve the organ shortage is comical. The fact is most people will die due to a lack of organs for transplant purposes. As to whether the American medical situation is that bad is merely a shift in argument. If people would be able to dispose of their organs at death for value this would become a great asset of one's estate which could be used to give ones survivors a bequest in addition to life insurance.
But speaking on the American Healthcare system, the 46 million number is very deceptive because it includes about 20 million who make at least $50,000 a year (of which 5 million make at least $75,000 a year) about another 16 million who are already eligible for government health programs and 10 million who are illegal/undocumented immigrants. Really, I would expect a little more from you.
Posted by: Ronald Ramo | September 12, 2007 09:24 PM
find some useful information about hair transplant
Posted by: amal | June 29, 2006 11:06 PM
Soon, people will kill the neighbours to recover the organs and the parents will make chieldren just for the organs that they can sell later. What they will not sale to the clinics they will sell it to butchers. We already heard about that german guy who killed another to eat him:-) I already imagine a spaghetti al sugo with plenty of onions to stay in the tradition:-)
Posted by: blisco jaio | May 29, 2006 05:08 PM
The health system is shameful in the USA. Progress was extremely limited by the "haves" who had insurance and got really cutting edge medicine for it. They wouldn't hear the voices, they couldn't see the writing on the wall. Now profiteering insurers and group medical coverage ration out medical aid, and for the enormous monthly payments you are not assured of getting anything.
I have heard, and I do not know if this is true, that an Italian can be covered up to €12000 per annum for hair loss treatment. Those of us who need cholesterol medicine to live were somewhat put out to have to prove we would die without it, when we were told that hair loss was a covered malady.
Posted by: Judith Greenwood | May 29, 2006 04:07 PM
ITALY and AMERICA need to get the program!
OR whatever was accomplished in last 100 years WILL quikly fade!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: LisAnne Becotte` | May 29, 2006 01:29 AM
Gianni Morandi has a track on one of his albums called "l'Americana", about someone who dreams only of living there: I think many, many Italians and also Australians would like to do this. WHY ?! The USA under the Republicans is just like a modern-day Russia, and its dreadful health system is not the only reason for this. The similarities are frightening, when you really look into them. Personally, I wanted for a long time, when my husband was still alive, to live in France (and that means that I, too, had a problem). The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, ehi, Beppe ...?
Però non capisco la ragione del tuo post: vuoi eliminare tutti i problemi del mondo forse. Buona fortuna bello ...
Posted by: Margaret-Rose STRINGER | May 29, 2006 01:08 AM
ma vadavia l'organ
Posted by: giulio porta | May 28, 2006 10:25 PM