healthcare deny organs non donors
The controversial part of this plan is how the status of “donor” is determined. Each standard that could be used has massive, and sometimes monstrous, negative ramifications. If the requirement is that recipients be donors for a certain number of years beforehand, then people who have been donors for a substantial but still inadequate time are being perversely punished simply for not having been doing their civic duty long enough (see also “past decision they cannot now undo” point below). If the standard is simply that they must have been a donor for any amount of time, however small, prior to needing the organ, this perversely encourages patients to hide their need for an organ long enough for them to register as donors and then collect their organ; any attempt to solve this would require doctors to report on their patients’ need for organs, eroding patient privacy and turning the doctor-patient relationship adversarial. The last of the proposed standards, that the recipient only need to sign up to be a donor in the future, causes all the alleged benefits of this to policy evaporate; the average person will not sign up to become a donor, as they know that they can always sign up later in the event that they need an organ. This plan only gets any benefit whatsoever if healthy people are signing up to be donors as a cautionary measure, rather than a small group of sick and likely elderly people who only sign up when they need organs. In addition to reducing the pool of donors, such a standard which calls for people to be donors from the time of their need onwards would require a massive breach of body rights to enforce. In order to make it binding (and prevent people from de-registering as donors once they no longer need organs), the state would have to say that they can no longer withdraw their consent to be donors, which amounts to the state laying claim to their organs.