Do you know how much the human body is worth, Mulder?’ Agent Dana Scully asks her FBI partner in the episode of The X-Files called ‘Hell Money’ (1996). She answers her own question: ‘It's worth a fortune.’ When a confused Agent Mulder replies, ‘There's no long-term business sense to dying,’ he fails to recognise that there is, just not for the body in the morgue. This episode depicts the vulnerabilities and inequalities on which organ procurers in the illegal ‘red market’ prey to ensure their business will remain profitable.

Potential donors participate in a game of chance: to win a large sum of money, they put their names in a jar. In another jar is a token to win the money, amongst other tokens with body parts on them. A name is chosen, and then a prize or punishment. Players remain in the game for two reasons. First, their financial situations and immigrant status have left them in desperate need of the prize for which they regularly gamble their biological material. Second, they are bound by a dedicated belief in the concept of hungry ghosts, the souls of dead ancestors angry that their kin travelled to this foreign land. Visualisations during the game and subsequent organ extraction reveal these angry ghosts to be one and the same with the organ transplant doctor collecting biological tribute. When Hsin Shuyang wants out of the game after attempting to win payment for his daughter's acute lymphocytic leukaemia treatments, the rhetorical strategies used to keep him playing include emphases on privilege (‘You’ve been luckier than most. All this time, and only one bad draw’), temptation (‘The pot is almost two million dollars’), hope (‘The money could help save your daughter's life’) and intimidation (‘No one leaves the game. Those are the rules’). Unsurprisingly, the FBI discovers that the system is rigged, that all the tokens are the same: players are expendable and interchangeable in their fates. Agent Scully does not express concern about the treatable form of cancer Shuyang's daughter suffers, failing to acknowledge that it is only treatable for those who can afford it. For the uninsured, very little is treatable, regardless of developments in modern medicine. But exclusion from the American medical system as patients does not exclude them from it as donors.