Bioethics Self Challenge: How Ridiculous Can I Get?

Well, after challenging myself to write something more ridiculous than that one time when I wrote, "I think we can assume that this family is evil," I wrote something more ridiculous in the following hour. For context, I will say that we have to discuss health care issues using principles of biomedical ethics we have read about. I would elect to only read the bold, but sure, you can read everything else too.

Should it be legal for people to buy organs for transplant, if they would not be able to receive an organ by waiting their turn through the national database? 

This is an issue that involves Justice. Essentially, if we allowed people to buy organs instead of organizing everyone onto a wait-list, we would be defining wealth/capital as a relevant property. Relevant properties are defined as conditions/things "that persons must possess to qualify for a particular distribution" (243). In this case, "particular distribution" refers to organs for organ transplantation. As much as I would like to say I know what the relevant property for currently receiving health care in America is, I do not have a full enough understanding of health insurance to posit more than a few tentative ideas.  

Oh god, and then there's like three different main types of health care, so I should not begin to discuss this.  

Regardless, I think that changing the relevant property/requirement for receiving organ transplants is antithetical to the way medicine wishes to be practiced in this country. I think this is why less than 20% of the physicians surveyed thought it would be okay for people to buy organs that they may not otherwise receive. It is unfortunate that some people may not receive organs, but if it is something that is going to happen regardless, this grave misfortune should befall everyone equally. 

I also believe that changing the system into a monied one would simply make the process of organ transplantation much more complicated. 

More practically, it also feels wrong to treat transplantations in this fashion. I would argue that by failing to keep justice equally distributed among all persons, you are allowing maleficence to occur. Example! Let's say child Batman and child Spiderman both need liver transplants. Well, little Bruce Wayne (Batman) has really rich parents while orphaned Peter Parker (Spiderman) has only his lower middle class aunt and uncle to look after him. Many arguments have proven that both Batman and Spiderman are of around equal importance to society later on in life. Yet, had this hypothetical situation occurred, and if organs were doled out in accordance with payment and not according to wait lists, little Peter would not have made it. 

By changing the way the system works, and by allowing a subgroup of people to have more power in the system than others, you are creating a social inequality around something as serious as life and death. With great power comes great responsibility, and I do not think that anyone with an ethical mind could easily approve of this level of injustice.   

References:
Beauchamp TL, Childress JF. Principle of Biomedical Ethics. 6th ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2009.197-199