Investors.com - How Strictest Price Control Of All Restrains A Great Medical Advance

Investors.com - How Strictest Price Control Of All Restrains A Great Medical Advance: "The most stringent of all price controls is permitting no price at all to be charged.

That is the legal situation in the United States and in various other countries, when it comes to people who donate one of their own organs to be transplanted into the body of someone else whose liver, kidneys or other organs are badly malfunctioning. It is illegal in these countries to charge for donating one's organs, though it is legal in some other countries such as Iran or Pakistan.

Here again, we can begin by looking at the effects of price control in general, and then see how that applies in a particular case, such as organ transplants.

The most common effect of laws limiting how high prices will be permitted to go is to reduce the quantity supplied. In the case of organ transplants, the number of Americans on waiting lists vastly exceeds the number of organs available, so that an absolute majority of those people die while waiting to get a new liver, kidney or other organ.

While 25,076 organ transplants were performed in the U.S. in 2003, the number of patients on official waiting lists for organs was more than three times that — 89,012. Both the number of kidney transplants and the number of people on waiting lists have doubled in 15 years, so the gap between the two has been widening. More than 50,000 Americans were on waiting lists for kidneys, while only about 12,000 kidneys were available to be transplanted."