Should organ donors have priority as organ donees?

The following excerpts from Chris Joyner, Proposal: Sign a donor card, move up on transplant list, USA Today, Jan. 25, 2009, discuss some of the difficulties faced with organ allocation:

Last fall, for the first time in its history, the national organ transplant waiting list topped 100,000 people, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the non-profit assigned by the federal government to maintain the list. The list is up to 100,457, and three out of every four are waiting for a kidney. * * *

The growing list of Americans waiting for organs prompted David Undis, president of the non-profit organ donation network LifeSharers, to propose last fall that UNOS reorder the list to give preference to patients who had agreed to become organ donors before their illness. The waiting list is now calculated to give the sickest patients the highest priority.

Undis says only half of the people eligible to become organ donors actually sign up, meaning millions of viable organs are buried with their original owners every year.

Creating “A” and “B” priority lists favoring those committed to becoming organ donors would greatly increase the number of people who sign up to be donors themselves, he says. No one would want to take the chance of ending up on the “B” list, Undis says.  * * *

Six-year-old LifeSharers, based in Nashville, is itself an attempt to create a preferential system in miniature. LifeSharers’ 10,000 members all have agreed to donate their organs upon their death, with the stipulation that first priority goes to any LifeSharers member in need.

Undis says the idea has not yet been put into practice because no members have died. Incorporating the LifeSharers model into the national waiting list has not gained much traction with UNOS, which has committees tasked with tweaking the waiting list protocols. * * *

Mark Fox, associate director of the Oklahoma Bioethics Center at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa, says fixes such as the LifeSharers plan have “inherent logic” to them.

Personally, I think that many European nations have an ever better solution because their laws presume that everyone is an organ donor unless they specifically sign an “anti-donor” card.