Harvesting the homeless

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), there are around 92,500 people waiting for an organ in the United States as of 11:40 p.m. August 1. However, this list has a problem: it is not compiled by UNOS, only maintained by it. The list is actually compiled by 256 different centers around the country who decide who lives and who dies based on their “own criteria,” that being how much money you have.

According to an ABC News story, as many as 25 percent of organ donations come from people with no insurance who, though they donate, will never be able to receive an organ transplant since hospitals will foot the bill for neither surgery no recovery.

The ABC News report quoted Laura Siminoff, a bioethicist, as saying.

From a very clinical point of view, you can ask what is the difference if the donor is dead? Except as a society we don’t view dead people as garbage.

Realistically speaking, we all know anyone without money to be in the overlords club—the rich WASPs who control America with an iron fist and make sure there’s plenty of Sesame Street and pornography to keep the rest of the country distracted—gets fucked by the system. That’s the way we decided the United States could best serve the interests of its people, so I don’t think anyone would argue against the right of the rich to harvest organs from the poor.

But Siminoff brings up an interesting point. The poor have families. Except for the rich, I don’t think anyone views the poor as garbage. Hell, every middle class family began as a poor family scraping and killing itself to in some way emulate the rich. We can relate to the poor, and the idea of them being used as parts in a system reminiscent of Soylent Green is probably upsetting.

The solution is clearly to use people who are considered garbage. In America, there are probably at least a million of these people, more than enough to satisfy UNOS’s waiting list, and probably enough to start exporting organs to other countries and maybe drag America’s economy back out of the red.

I’m talking about the homeless.

According to Unicef’s 1998 report, at that time, the United States had 750,000 homeless people. I will leave it to readers’ imaginations to guess how this number has changed a little bit during the Bush administration. Even if you’re a Republican, and by that I mean you honestly believe this number has decreased the last six years as holy Jesus beams have shined from Washington, there are still more than enough people here to cover the waiting list.

But collecting organs from homeless people does merit serious consideration. A reasonably healthy adult can yield a pair of kidneys, a set of lungs, a heart, a stomach, an esophagus, a tongue, two eyeballs, a gall bladder, 20 feet of small intestine, various replacement ligaments, around two square meters of skin, more bone marrow than you can shake a stick at, and, assuming you begin processing them pre-mortem, 5.6 liters of good blood.

Taking this blood topic a little further, the homeless collectively hold an untapped reservoir of 4.2 million liters of blood. This breaks down to:

• 2.07 million liters of Type O
• 1.84 million liters of Type A
• 506 thousand liters of Type B
• 184 thousand liters of Type AB

For simplicity’s sake, I am not breaking this down by Rhesus Factors. I think the point is made just as well. You know how The Red Cross always reminds us every unit (1 pint) of blood can save 3 lives? The homeless collectively hold 8.096 million units of blood. This means by harvesting the homeless we can save 24.288 million lives.

Some of you may note blood is considered a connective tissue and not an organ, granted, but if we’re going to harvest these people, I believe our motto should be “Waste not, want not.” Remember how the Native Americans were famed for using “the whole buffalo”?

I digress, let’s get back to organs. You may have noticed I did not include the liver on my list of organs to harvest. This is for two reasons.

First off, I don’t believe alcoholics are worth saving. If we’re going to waste perfectly good organs on someone who is just going to ruin them again, we should look into harvesting them from more disposable sources, like adult boars.

Secondly, the homeless are probably not the best source of healthy livers. A lot of these people are homeless because of … oh what’s the politically correct term … “substance abuse problems.” They’re bums. Hobos. Winos. People with a chemical dependency. If they aren’t ruining their livers with 180 proof ethanol, they are ruining it with denatured alcohol. You see, in order to deny the homeless what little pleasure they can find in life and keep them from diminishing the alcohol supply the rest of us use, many cities have ordinances banning sale of alcohol to anyone who “looks” homeless. This has forced our grubby donors to turn to “harder” substances, like Listerine. Listerine uses denatured alcohol, which is essentially ethanol cut with antifreeze. You know the pleasant tingle when you swish Listerine? Hint: it’s not the mint.

But short of a liver, I think the homeless are the answer to America’s need for parts.

Let’s look at the other side of the equation. Do you realize how much it costs society to maintain a homeless population? While I cannot find statistic for the USA, a CBC report says Canada spends at least $1 billion Canadian in order to provide basic services to its homeless. Given there is a smaller population of homeless in Canada and Americans are better at spending money without actually doing anything, I’ll let you imagine a figure the USA spends. But don’t take currency conversion into account. While back in the good old days, $1 US equaled $1.43 Canadian, it’s more like $1 to $1.03 these days.

For more US based statistics on homelessness, I turned to The Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness—but I think they and I have fundamentally different ideas on how to do this. According to the site, homeless people are lazy. When they go to the hospital, they stay there around four extra days. First off, they aren’t paying for their trip to begin with, Medicaid is–in other words, you are. These extra days add up to $2,414 per person per hospitalization. In Hawaii alone, their 1,751 homeless adults were hospitalized 564 times and ran up a $4 million bill for taxpayers.

Homeless people also like to go to jail. During wintertime, they throw bricks through windows just to get out of the cold. I suppose when you’re desperate, being someone’s bitch is better than being Jack Frost’s bitch. Each homeless person costs $14,480 per year for overnight jail stays, and for the ones who earn a longer stay in a full-blown Federal “pound-me-in-the-ass” in prison, each bed smacks taxpayers for $20,000 per year. For that same price, you could put one of these bums through a four-year university.

With 750,000 homeless people in the United States, I’m sure you can imagine what our garbage gourmets are costing taxpayers per year.

The only other solution to the homeless problem would be forced labor, but really, if these people wanted to work and had the ethic to produce something, they probably wouldn’t be homeless. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from our government, it’s that if you’re rich you’re lucky, and if you’re poor, you deserve it.

I think it’s time for our society to stop holding the homeless’ hands. They’ve had it too easy for too long with the shelters and soup kitchens and free medical care that we pay for. They don’t even feel guilty about it. A hard working family of four may be left to split a can of peas between the four of them for dinner; meanwhile they are still paying for a bum to have medical treatment, a warm bed, and a good meal every night. It’s not right. These bums earn more in services than the combined income of many poor households.

Harvesting the homeless will clean up the streets, provide a few hundred warehouses of viable organs, a lake or two of blood, lower taxes and save our government much needed capital for when it attacks Iran next year to kidnap another democratically elected president.