Organ Selling in Singapore: The Sad Real Story

My colleagues at the ministry of health tell me that we're NOT legalizing compensation or sale of kidneys as such. Instead what we're doing is to amend the law which currently prohibits any kind of payment to allow for the "comprehrensive reimbursement"  of the "costs, expenses, and loss of earnings reasonably incurred by altruistic living organ donors."  (Don't ask me what the difference is between legalizing compensation and allowing reimbursement; my MOH colleagues always seem prickly about one thing or another).

They also tell me that the amendment will bring the currently outdated organ transplant law at par with other international legislations, eg US, UK, which allow for donor to be paid for expenses incurred in relation to donation in the interest of donor welfare. In addition to allowing payments for expenses, the govt will be putting in many big donor welfare initiatives such as donor care registry to follow-up donor over long term to understand the health and social outcomes of living donation, donor counselling and education programmes, etc.

On your question abt health tourism, i doubt this will happen because there isn't much spare capacity in our public health sector to service foreign patients. In our private health sector, there already are quite a lot of efforts in this direction, but i'm not sure whether this new business of organ transplants will be all that lucrative.

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