Maybe there is a startup opportunity to sell spare kidneys, and even lungs and liver-halfs too! Maybe even a cash-for-corpses business, we need to get rid of these ridiculous self-serving medical regulations. DISRUPT!
When you can grow back your kidneys, lungs, and livers, this will be a sensible extension of the idea.
I initially wanted to make this comment sarcastically, but really, if we become capable of regrowing organs within your body you could legitimately make a business case for it.
In a typical adult recipient LDLT, 55 to 70% of the liver (the right lobe) is removed from a healthy living donor. The donor's liver will regenerate approaching 100% function within 4–6 weeks, and will almost reach full volumetric size with recapitulation of the normal structure soon thereafter. It may be possible to remove up to 70% of the liver from a healthy living donor without harm in most cases. The transplanted portion will reach full function and the appropriate size in the recipient as well, although it will take longer than for the donor.
You know you make new blood, and people donate blood regularly? Apart from small slices of liver, your organs don't really regrow. You could donate/sell one of your kidneys, but we now know there are negative long-term effects of that.
Somewhat OT, but kidney donation is surprisingly low risk in the long term.
"Compared to the general public, most kidney donors have equivalent (or better) survival, excellent quality of life, and no increase in end-stage kidney disease"
I would suspect that there is a selection bias here, as a whole lot of the low end of the general health distribution would prevent you from donating a kidney, or at least make it less likely. So you'd expect them to do better than average if donation had no effect.
To know if there is an effect, you need to not compare to the general public, but to a subset similar in factors which are associated with the outcome measures to kidney donors.
You can sell plasma, can you still sell your blood in the US? I know you could on one point, but people with blood-borne illnesses shouldn't give blood, and with a financial incentive there were problems with people lying about it.
Yes. It ends up being unprofitable to buy from donors directly, but it is still legal. There is also a thriving secondary market in selling donated blood, the Red Cross for instance makes a large amount of money selling blood.