Best Rationing System Requires No Rationing

Imagine you have two units of a valuable commodity, yet you only really need one.
You might want to keep both, so you have a backup should anything happen. On the other hand, you might decide that the funds you could raise by selling your spare are worth taking the risk that you might need it someday. But there is a catch. You can give away your extra, or even barter with it, but you cannot sell it.
This is the current state of kidney donation.
In the United States, there were only 14,000 kidney transplants last year, against a waiting list of more than 100,000 patients. Thousands of people die annually while waiting for an organ. Nor is the problem confined to America; the World Health Organization reported on the problem of a worldwide shortage back in 2007. It has only worsened since.
A variety of solutions to this problem have been proposed, many of which were touched upon in a recent editorial in The New York Times. (1) These suggestions include changing from an opt-in to an opt-out system of postmortem donation; a more efficient system of allocating donated organs; covering the cost of living donations and offering living donors a variety of benefits after donating. But the most potentially effective strategy is the most controversial: repealing the law that prohibits the sale of human organs.