Roughly 10% of all organ transplants in the world are obtained on the black market. A new investigation by puts a brutal face on that underground world.

As ingenious, painstaking and justifiably attention-getting as domino swaps are, they should not blot out the dismal news that rates of kidney donation, from both living and deceased donors, fall woefully short of the need.

It is time for a state to challenge the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act and offer funeral benefits or some other reward to the estate of those who will give their organs at death.

Today, over 92,000 people are waiting for organs--mostly kidneys--and each day eighteen of them will die before getting one.

The government should devise a safe, regulated system in which would-be donors are offered incentives to donate a kidney.

If we really want to increase the supply of organs, we need to try incentives--financial and otherwise.

Triage on the economic front is Job One for the incoming Obama administration and the 111th Congress. Maybe it is Job Two and Job Three as well.

The Speaker of the House at the turn of the twentieth century could not resist imperialism and quietly resigned.