Should you be able to buy a kidney (and for how much )? | FT #shorts

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]If you could pick one market that doesn't exist in the US that should exist, what would you pick? At this point, I would like to see us be more generous to kidney donors. So, there's a big shortage of kidneys for transplantation. There are lots of issues you would have to deal with if you wanted to be able to compensate living kidney donors for donating a kidney. I think that those are manageable, that we could design an ethical, legal, equitable market that would not exploit potential donors and would save many thousands of lives every year in the US and if extended millions of people around the world. Do you have a sense of what the price would be for a kidney? Like an order of magnitude? So, I would think we could be very generous because it would save the American healthcare system or any country's healthcare system a lot of money because dialysis, which is a much medically inferior way to keep people alive when they have kidney failure, is also much more expensive than transplants. In the United States, a transplant costs is around the same roughly as a year of dialysis. But after a year of dialysis, you need another year of dialysis. So, Medicare spends $55 billion a year on kidney failure. Almost all of that is on dialysis. So, you could really cut the bill to the American taxpayer and still pay 80,000 or 100,000 dollars for a kidney, which I bet is above the clearing price.