What would you do to save a loved one, asks the short film "Everything."

Produced by the Institute for Justice, "Everything" dramatizes the difficulty of a family struggling to find a bone-marrow donor for a child. The movie makes a powerful case for an obvious solution that we at Reason have advanced for decades: Compensate donors who provide organs, body tissue, and other substances. Waiting lists and deaths attributable to chronic shortages would shrink overnight.

But such an obvious, common-sense solution is blocked at every turn by defenders of a status quo that serves everyone's interest but the patient's. While donors can be compensated for certain substances (blood plasma, sperm), federal law prohibits the sale of organs, body tissue, and a variety of other substances. Sometimes the argument against compensation is rooted in religious objections and sometimes it's masked in the language of "medical ethics." What never gets addressed is a death toll that will continue to climb as more and more people need transplants and are denied by a supply chain that doesn't come close to meeting demand.

Here's the original writeup about "Everything." Go here for more information about the movie and larger cause.