The Medical Freedom Channel

David Undis is President and founder of LifeSharers, a non-profit organization dedicated to getting every person to agree to donate his or her organs to those who need them, in exchange for the same privilege in return. There is no charge to join LifeSharers, only the promise to make your organs available to others who have signed up, upon your death. By getting a large segment of the population to voluntarily agree to this arrangement, Undis hopes to help remedy the current critical shortage of transplantable organs, overcoming the “market distortion” created by government and other factors outside the realm of health and wellness. I had the chance to interview him this week, and learned some very interesting things in the process, while getting to know a little about this compassionate visionary.

How did Life Sharers get started?

It started about 3-1/2 years ago. I kept reading articles about how few people were organ donors, and it occurred to me that if you had to be registered as an organ-donor to be eligible for a transplant, it might help to fix this problem. I did some research and found out I was not the first person to think of this wonderful idea, but nobody had ever done anything about it. So I decided that I would … and the Internet really makes it possible.

As I understand it, the basic premise is that you sign up to be a donor, which gives you some sort of inside track on becoming a recipient if you need an organ.

Yes, when you sign up you agree to donate your organs, and offer them first to other members. In exchange, you would get preferred access to the organs of every other person in the group. As the group expands, your chances of getting a transplant, if you ever need one, keep going up. This is significant, because right now there are over 90,000 people awaiting transplants, and over half of them are going to die before they get one. So any chance to improve your odds can be substantial. And since it doesn’t cost anything to join, it’s a pretty good deal.

Does Life Sharers supercede other organ donor programs?

No, this does not limit your chances of getting an organ from another source, All you are doing is increasing your chances of getting an organ, if you should need one, from another LifeSharers member.

What are the biggest resistances you encounter when promoting this program?

The objection I hear most is that it’s not fair – that the organs should go to the sickest people, in order of their needs. Interestingly enough, that’s not how organs are distributed now, anyway. Everyone thinks the sickest people get them first, but that’s now how it works. They take into account all sorts of non-medical factors …

Including politics …

Politics … money … race … geography … Lots of other things as well. The one thing they don’t take into account is whether or not you are a donor. About 70 percent of the organs transplanted in this country go to people who have not agreed to donate their own organs. That sounds to me like a really good way to guarantee that the result is going to be a shortage. If you can jump to the front of the list without agreeing to donate your own … well, you can do the math!

So when you agree to donate an organ, you are not agreeing to have someone come and harvest it out of your living body. It would seem that the answer to someone resisting the idea is to say, “Sign up for LifeSharers – it won’t cost you a penny, and you’ll be donating organs only after you can no longer use them yourself!”

Exactly. We’re only talking about deceased organ donation, after you’re dead and can’t use them anymore. Each year, due to the organ shortage, about 8,000 people die in the United States, waiting for organs to be donated, while Americans are burying or cremating about 20,000 transplantable organs. That’s more than enough to fix this problem. We don’t need scientific breakthroughs or medical advancements, we just need behavior change. We have to stop throwing away organs that could save our neighbors’ lives.

Is part of the resistance related to religion? I know, for example, that strict adherence to Orthodox Judaic law requires, or at least used to, that a body be buried completely intact, and some other faiths also tend to adhere to this sort of restriction as well.

There’s not very much of a religious component on this issue. Every major religion supports organ donations. And I don’t know of any religious tradition that says you should not donate your organs, but you should take them from others if you need them. If there is a religion like that, I sure wouldn’t want to belong to it.

Do you see this as a sort of bridge to a market for human organs?

Well, LifeSharers IS a market-based system, although it is a non-monetary one. Were it not illegal to buy and sell human organs, LifeSharers would not exist. Since it is, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, this is the only approach we can take. Can you imagine your Congressman standing up in front of TV cameras, advocating legalization of the buying and selling of kidneys? It’s just not going to happen. There are too many people out there who are opposed to the idea. So LifeSharers is a non-monetary market – legal under federal law, as well as in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We wouldn’t have the shortages in the first place, were it not for the ban on sales. That’s effectively a case of price-controls: The Federal government instituted price-controls on the sale of organs, and set the maximum price at zero! You don’t have to be an economist to figure out that is going to cause a shortage.

What ideas do you have for applying these principles to other “social problems”?

I haven’t really considered that. The whole concept of “sharing” is intriguing, and one of the things that got me interested in this in the first place. I haven’t yet been able to figure out what else to do with it.

It’s ironic that one of the major challenges libertarians and other pro-liberty people face is in presenting themselves as caring and concerned people, showing how the poor in a free society would not suffer but would be cared for – voluntarily, out of concern for each other, and because we choose to, not because we are forced to. And “forced charity” is of course an oxymoron.

Yes, and LifeSharers is a good example of that, because we are freely sharing. People who are experts on this sort of thing have written to me, saying that the principle of organs going first to those willing to be donors actually means that poor people will benefit more than anyone else, because it is they who are most often cut out of programs for receiving transplants. If you increase the supply of organs, poor people will be the first to gain from that, even disproportionately so.

And, because there is no financial cost, that is no longer a barrier, either.

Yes, LifeSharers does not discriminate on any basis: age, sex, religion, race, etc., etc. – let alone financial position, since we do not charge for membership.

Let me ask a broader question, since this web channel is about the larger issue of health freedom in general. How do you see healthcare reform progressing in the coming years? What is your vision of an ideal healthcare system?

Let me sort of back into that. … I see health savings accounts as becoming a bigger component as time goes on. As individuals start making more decisions about their own healthcare, that’s going to fix a lot of the problems. Another thing, that has caused just about every problem in the healthcare system, is the way they’ve set up the tax system, so employers get a tax break for providing health coverage for employees instead of more money. This distorts all the economic decision-making. So if we ever get around to any rational tax reform, if they will play with that, it can perhaps fix a lot of the trouble. In the meantime, these health savings accounts have a huge potential to make the kinds of changes we need.

Beyond that, it seems that whether it’s government or something else we’ve gotten to be such a third-party payments system, with no market control of prices or cost-containment, and a bedpan is priced like some Pentagon screwdriver …

You look at the way the healthcare system is organized – consider how that would work if it was applied to food, or cars – and you quickly realize that it’s pretty stupid.

I just wonder how we can find our way out of it, and restore some of the old doctor-patient, one-to-one relationship that health once was based on.

The two parts of our country that are most messed up are the healthcare system and the educational system. Meanwhile, those are the two segments of society that have the most government involvement. Coincidence? I think not!

I guess I should toot our own horn a bit, It’s no coincidence that two of these three channels that ISIL is funding so far, are on medical freedom and educational choice, seeking free market solutions in both arenas. While the third, environmental reform, represents an area where the biggest polluter is … the government itself!

Very true.

Thank you, David. I hope LifeSharers continues to grow and become increasingly more a part of the solution and a pathway to liberty.