[Opinion]Organ Transplant Law That Prevents Organ Transplants

Even as the whole nation is savoring its advance to the World Cup final 8, there are neighbors in pain instead of in jubilation. Their lives are hanging by a thread as they hopelessly wait for donors.

The government enacted the Organ Transplant Act in February 2000 in a move to legalize organ transplants. Strangely enough, however, since the enactment the number of organ donors decreased sharply to one third – organ donations from brain death cases, which reached 162 in 1999, fell down to 64 in 2000, 52 in 2001 and 13 in the first half of this year. And the number is not likely to reach 30 by the yearend.

In contrast, more and more people are joining the waiting list. The number on the list has tripled from 2084 in 2000 to 9334 in April 2002. This is just according to an official tally.

The National Organ Transplant Management Center under the Ministry of Health and Welfare is currently in charge of handling the complicated process. The center aims to root out illegal trading of organs and fairly distribute donated organs to patients. But does ‘fair distribution’ make sense when there is not much to distribute?

The first priority should be finding a way to increase supplies to strike a balance between the supply and the demand side. To do that, the law must be focused on ‘efficiency’ rather than ‘regulation.’ The Act, however, from the beginning was designed to regulate donations and thus became an evil law.

Although the government has proposed an amendment of the law to the parliament, it is not likely to address the problem. The proposal, which aims to simplify the process of seeking consent from families of the deceased, reduce the number of deliberation members to one and establish an organization handling brain death cases, is not enough.

What we need is to change the way of thinking fundamentally. We need to ‘privatize’ the process as we do with loss-making government-owned corporations. We will soon see jails run by private businesses. And it is not efficient at all for the government to supervise organ donations that take place in the private-sector area.

Bureaucracy has not proved efficient when it comes to take speedy actions. Of the 17 countries that approved organ transplants under the law, Korea is the only country that decisions are made by the government. It is doctors who find, take out and transplant organs. Not officials in the management center. Officials can only help expedite the process.

If we have no faith in doctors, we will not ease the critical shortage of transplant organs. It also does not make sense it takes 7 to 10 doctors confirm a brain death when time is the key. It takes two in the U.S. and they are held accountable if things go wrong. Judges and prosecutors take ‘conscience’ seriously when executing the law. Therefore, doctors remain restrained from doing something against their conscience facing criminal charges.

At the same time, the government must help families of the deceased who made difficult decisions, so that they don’t have to go through lengthy document filing. The center must serve as an agency that help them throughout the process. The government also should not prevent donations to family members or relatives without a written will by sticking to impartiality too much.

It must offer incentives to hospitals that find donors to encourage them to continue to do so. Offering compensations to families must be seriously considered as well, since such arrangements will reward good intentions in a realistic way. We do not need to see it as selling lives. This way, we will be able to effectively curb the underground trading.

It is reported that up to 300,000 have agreed to donate their organs after death. To make good out of their noble decisions, the Organ Transplant Act must be abolished instead of amended. We must go back to square one and find an alternative to save 10,000 lives hanging by a thread. And the answer is to let private entities manage the process while the government punishes wrongdoers.