Are you KIDNEYing Me???

It’s over. As the Arabs would say, its “khalas.” Finito in Spanish. Tapos in Tagalog.

There will be no more transplants of Filipino kidneys to foreign patients, including Saudis and other Arabs who are the biggest customers of Filipino donors.

The Department of Health (DOH) said so last Tuesday.

And that’s not all. The DOH is also planning to ban even Filipino patients from receiving kidneys if the donors are not their relatives.

Sarado na talaga ang market for kidneys – yan ang gusto nilang mangyari.

Are they kidneying, I mean kidding? May kasabihan na, “If there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Ang Pinoy pa!? Eh ang titinik nating mag-paikot-ikot sa batas.

And a hungry stomach knows one way to feed itself – through the sale of its co-organ kidney. Eh kung dalawa nga lamang ang heart ng Pinoy, baka binenta na rin pati yung isang puso.

Yan ang gawa ng mga poor residents ng Baseco compound in Tondo, Manila. There, the men try to outdo each other on who has the longest scar in the side of his body – the scar that would prove that he has undergone operation to remove one of his pair of kidneys for sale to a foreign buyer.

Foreigners with healthy pockets but with ailing kidneys will always find a way to get what they want, especially if there are thousands of donors ready to part with one of their kidneys for as cheap as $1,500 or about 60,000 pesos -- a price 20 times cheaper than those in the United States.

Barya-barya lang yan sa mga foreigners, pero feeling millionaire na dyan ang mga pobre nating kababayan.

Sky’s the limit in the number of ways by which this kidney transplant ban can be circumvented. Kung hindi na pwedeng gawin sa Pilipinas ang kidney transplant, the foreign patient can have the donor flown to another country where the operation can be undertaken. At wa na say ang Philippine government dun.

Pwede ding mag-peke ng dokumento yung foreigner, saying he’s a relative by consanguinity to the kidney donor. Naku, baka dumami ang mga customers for fake birth certificates sa Recto.

Any which way you look at this problem, na human rights violation daw according to the Church and other do-gooders, simple lang ang solusyon: Payamanin ang mahihirap.

Pero syempre, that’s easier said than done.