While police forces around the world search for the Indian doctor who scammed hundreds out of their kidneys, his wife and children remain barricaded behind security doors at their Brampton home. … Neighbours said Kumar, his wife Poonam Ameet, and their two boys, 5 and 4, moved into the area last April and the children attend a local private school. Documents obtained by the Star show the couple bought the four-bedroom home on Pali Dr., in the predominantly Indian neighbourhood of Bovaird Dr. and Airport Rd., in April 2007 for $610,000. … “I was shocked, blown away,” said a neighbour. “We used to joke at parties that he must be loaded to get such a beautiful wife, but nothing prepared us for this.” Added one: “It’s very unusual for someone to come here from India and buy a big house like this and a Lexus. Doctors in India just don’t make that kind of money.” Poonam, 28, has told friends on the street that her marriage to Kumar was arranged when she was 18. Amit has also confided that his first wife left him after his arrest in 1994 on suspicion of running a kidney transplant racket in Mumbai. But police say he jumped bail, changed his name and set up again. No one was answering the door at Kumar’s champagne brick home yesterday, but children could be seen peeking through the closed blinds. A glass security door installed on Thursday was locked and a taped phone message said service “is temporarily disconnected.”

Money is clearly the issue in situations involving the human body. Paying young women for eggs to be fertilized and men for sperm is now common practice — even though they are still regularly referred to as “donors.” Yet the sale of tissue, cells and eggs for stem-cell research or organs for transplant are still the subject of vehement dispute.

Pope John Paul II said that treating human organs as part of any commercial exchange is “morally unacceptable,” a view echoed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.

In the United States federal law prohibits the sale or purchase of human organs. The American Kidney Foundation itself opposes payments on the ground that it “devalues life.” And the conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who was chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002 to 2005, has called the commercialization of body parts “just inherently wrong.”

“If we come to think about ourselves like pork bellies, pork bellies we will become,” Mr. Kass has written.

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the institute who was herself the recipient of a kidney donation in 2006, asserts that the issue does not need to pit human dignity against saving a life. “A salaried fireman who saves a life is not less heroic,” she said. “An object or act can have a price and still be invaluable.”

She has forcefully argued in The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere that the sale of human organs with proper oversight to prevent exploitation of the poor should be permitted. There are 74,000 people on the waiting list, and in 2006 about 4,400 died before they could get a kidney. The need is too great, she said. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and his colleague Julio Jorge Elias have even calculated how much a kidney should sell for to eliminate the backlog completely.

In recent years Mr. Roth has helped set up “paired kidney donations,” in effect, allowing sets of donors and patients to swap kidneys in order to find a compatible one. These kidney exchanges, which started in 2005, have gained growing acceptance nationwide, he said.

Thats really low and completely outrageous.

This is what socialized medicine leads to.

well… this is what PPP leads to.

i know. this is a huge concern in canada. i’ve not needed to test the system in any way but i know it’s busted here – but having elderly parents… the linked story sent chills and i worry for them.

getting back to kidney transplants – i think the process of selling is morally corruptING [notice the gerund. i didnt say corrupT, but corruptING] – it makes for a situation in which ghouls like this amit kumar act wth impunity because the supporting infrastructure is able to ‘legally’ justify away their role in the harvesting.

We met a lot of different people who had received kidney transplants via a support program thru Hinduja hospital whenever my mom used to go for her Dialysis and almost all of them exclusively were wealthy enough to have “funded” a kidney from a “relative” from the village. I know two people personally who found someone from their village willing to give the kidney. There was a financial transaction under the table but essentially they claimed that they were “related” and the person was doing it legally.

Beyond that the chances of finding a kidney thru the databank is next to impossible. The wait is very very long and the priorities are set depending on who has more money and more connection as well as most ethical doctors if they had the power would give it to someone who would be a “good” recipient. Meaning they’d be young and in good health, able to handle the surgery and sustain it. Older folks who had the surgery almost exclusively found the donor on their own the hook and crook way.

And yes if I could have convinced someone from our village to do it for money if they were a match I could have but we couldn’t find anyone. We searched.

 "And all morality aside I'd have done it in a heartbeat. . . " - Ah, the exquisite ethical "agonizing"

 "A morality case could be made. The poor person will subject his kidney to breaking down of bad country liquor and thus torture his kidney.                   Instead a rich man would use it to break down some fine scotch. Thus it's philanthropy (or is it philkidephy) for the good of the kidney."

-The ironic Swiftian moral commentary

Really folks, ask yourselves: Where, Oh Where else but in India? Perhaps after all we really do inhabit a hell of our own making. . .