Comment on "The Shortage in Market-Inalienable Human Organs": Faulty Analysis of a Failed Policy

In the 1998 article "The Shortage in Market-Inalienable Human Organs: A Consideration of 'Nonmarket' Failures" in this journal, Emanuel D. Thorne advocates increased exhortation and advises against the adoption of markets in cadaveric organ procurement. In support of this view, Thorne offers analysis in which he purports to show that, with more effective exhortation, a donative system is capable of procuring more organs at lower costs than market procurement. We argue that Thorne's analysis is seriously flawed and that his conclusions are suspect, if not entirely illogical. The flaws in his analysis include both logical errors and empirical fallacies. Importantly, the issues we, and Professor Thorne, address are not mere matters of academic quibbling--human lives are at stake. Simply put, we argue that Thorne uses faulty analysis to support a policy that is so ill-conceived that it needlessly allows people to die. In this comment, we discuss some of the errors in Thorne's article and explain why we believe that his policy recommendation is ill-conceived.