Great Britain helped to pioneer publicly funded health care, with the introduction of the National Health Service in the aftermath of World War II. Today, however, that same country is opening new frontiers in market-driven medicine. The British Department of Health has announced that it is considering legalizing payments for organ donors.

The announcement follows reports that two doctors in the U.K. have been found guilty of complicity in the purchase of kidneys for transplant. In recent years reports have surfaced of organs purchased from poor citizens of India, and sold to wealthy patients from India, the West, or the Middle East.

The British proposal would see "compensatory payments" made to relatives who donated their kidneys to a patient needing a transplant. Authorities hope this would help to improve the availability of donor organs. Professor Sir Peter Bell, Vice President of the Royal College of Surgeons says:

"I think you could do a lot to encourage live donation from relatives. I think it is wrong to be talking about buying organs from the third world when they have (sic) relatives whom they could go to, all of whom have not offered a kidney. How can that be right?"

This proposal, which will remind many of the "Live Organ Donations" comedy sketch from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, is being treated very seriously. Apparently Sir Peter and the Department of Health object not to the buying and selling of organs, but to "outsourcing" from Far Eastern suppliers. Far better, they believe, to keep the money in England or even in the family. Why shouldn’t Cousin Bert sell you his kidney and use the money to by a new telly, rather than have the proceeds go to some Third World peasant.

Labour News believes the British Labour government and Tony Blair are making a fundamental mistake by even considering this proposal. As firm believers in the free market, they should know that a policy like this is doomed to failure. Any attempt to restrict the import of organs would immediately be subject to a World Trade Organization complaint as an unfair trade practice.

If the Labour Party in Britain has sunk to this level, they should at least try to make the appropriate political appointments. Our nomination: John Cleese for Minister of Health.