If you’re an American, when you donate your kidney — either to a loved one, as most donors do, or to a stranger, as I did — you pay nothing for the medical side of things. In the United States, Medicare has, since the Nixon administration, picked up the costs of dialysis (where you have a machine replace the normal functions of your kidneys) and transplantation for people with severe kidney disease. And because transplantation saves money relative to dialysis, Medicare is more than happy to pay both the don
Source: Kidney transplant: how Trump could encourage donations – Vox