Kidney Sales
It's estimated that 30,000 Americans die each year because they need kidney transplants, but kidneys are in short supply due to the federal ban on organ sales.

Hans Bader writes at FEE:

(Law prof Ilya) Somin and others say the ban on organ sales should be repealed to save lives. Back in 2011, kidney donor Alexander Berger explained why kidney sales should be legal in The New York Times. Berger was a researcher for GiveWell, a nonprofit that helps charitable donors decide where to give. Berger predicted that allowing kidney donors to be compensated would save countless lives by giving people an incentive to donate their kidneys, resulting in a vast increase in kidney donations.

Right now, people have to be unusually altruistic to donate a kidney, since you have to spend several days in the hospital to donate one, take off a lot of time from work, and run a tiny risk of death. Few people are that selfless. Allowing kidney sales would also help the poor, who currently often are unable to obtain kidneys: as Berger notes, people unable to get kidney transplants now are "disproportionately African-American and poor."

Save Taxpayer Money

If kidney sales were legal, the taxpayers would save money, too. The government would be able to simply pay for kidney transplants for poor and elderly people who need them (including the cost of buying the kidney needed for the transplant), rather than paying for years and years of costly dialysis treatment through Medicare and Medicaid. The purchase price of a kidney would be much less than the ongoing cost of dialysis.

As Berger noted, if the government paid for kidneys, that would actually "save the government money; taxpayers already foot the bill for dialysis for many patients through Medicare, and research has shown that transplants save more than $100,000 per patient, relative to dialysis." (By legalizing organ sales, one nation, Iran, was able to eliminate waiting lists for transplants, and avoid the staggering costs of widespread dialysis.)

As Berger observed, people who receive compensation for their kidneys will not be "exploited." While there is some risk associated with donating a kidney--the whole reason compensation is needed--"the risk of death during surgery is about 1 in 3,000," smaller than many risks that everyone is already allowed to take in exchange for money or just for the heck of it. Moreover, a kidney donor's "remaining kidney will grow to take up the slack of the one that has been removed." So donating a kidney does not interfere with leading a normal life.

Professor Somin says the exploitation argument against organ sales is logically inconsistent. Most of the people who "oppose legalizing organ markets because they believe it would lead to exploitation" have "no objection to letting poor people perform much more dangerous work, such as becoming lumberjacks or NFL players."

...Moreover, as Somin notes,

In addition to offering payment to living donors, we can pay potential donors in advance for the 'option' of harvesting organs after they pass away, a strategy that eliminates any negative health effects on donors, since, by definition, the option can only be exercised after they have died, and have no further use for the organ themselves.

Such an option eliminates any risk of "exploitation."

I will give my organs away and stated my desire to be an organ donor on my driver's license.

By the way, welcome to the big beautiful world of inconsistencies:

Many kinds of body tissue can be purchased, so why not organs like kidneys, livers, and hearts? In 2011, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it is legal to compensate bone marrow donors. Similarly, as Berger points out:

[W]e already allow paid plasma, sperm and egg donation, as well as payment for surrogate mothers. Contrary to early fears that paid surrogacy would exploit young, poor minority women, most surrogate mothers are married, middle class and white; the evidence suggests that, far from trying to 'cash in,' they take pride in performing a service that brings others great happiness.

And we regularly pay people to take socially beneficial but physically dangerous jobs -- soldiers, police officers and firefighters all earn a living serving society while risking their lives -- without worrying that they are taken advantage of. Compensated kidney donors should be no different.

People in need of other organs, like hearts, would also benefit from legalizing organ sales. As Emily Largent observes at the Harvard Law School website, there is also a large "unmet need for hearts, lungs, livers, and other vital organs" that might be filled, if organ donations were compensated.