Reference no: EM132460957

In the United States, there are 123,000 people in need of an organ. How much are your body parts worth?

In theory, if you could harvest every organ and chemical in your body, you could make a cool $45M! But in reality, Medical Transcription estimates, the average price of a human dead body is more likely to fetch around $550,000 (with a few key body parts driving up the price).

So how does that all break down? Well, first depends if we're talking about selling your organs legally or via the black market. The biggest-ticket organ you can legally sell in the U.S. is your heart: They're going for a cool $1 million. Livers come in second, worth about $557,000 and kidneys fetch about $262,000 each. Widespread diabetes and heart disease are what has made these particular organs so expensive.

On the black market, however, prices are considerably lower: maybe 10% of the above costs. In the US alone, there are currently 123,000 people waiting for organs (100,000 for kidneys), but only about 14,000 organs are donated per year. This means every day about 18 die waiting for a transplant. This worldwide organ shortage has caused a black market to crop up: the old "supply and demand thing". Surely Adam Smith had no idea the economic concept he coined would one day be applied to human skin ($10/inch), stomach ($500) and eyeballs ($1,500 each) one day.

The creepiest part of all this is where black market organs are coming from. The abject poor in dire need of cash, prisoners (dead and alive!), looted graves ... some entrepreneurial organ brokers have resorted to paying off morticians at funeral homes! When families or individuals are tired of spending years on a medical waiting list, they sometimes purchase body parts - kidneys, eyes, lungs, heart, limbs and more - for transplant on the black market.