HOUSTON - Butch Morgan needs a kidney transplant. Morgan needs one badly enough that he's put up a billboard ad along the Gulf Freeway asking for one.

"I'm at that Y in the road where I'm going to have to go on dialysis unless someone gives me one right away," he said.

This is not his first billboard or his first transplant. Six years ago, he put up a sign when he was already in kidney failure and on dialysis. He freely admitted if there was some way he could cut ahead in line, he would.

"There is no line," he said.

After a celebrity or someone rich and powerful gets a transplant, there's always speculation they "bought" the organ. When Steve Jobs got a new liver in Memphis in 2009, there was rampant speculation. Now that Former VP Dick Cheney has had a heart transplant at 71, there is similar speculation.

The rumors got a boost when a cardiologist in La Jolla, California named Dr. Eric Topil tweeted: "The ethical issues are not that he had a transplant, but who didn't?"

But is it possible to game the system?

"It's highly unlikely," said Michele Zamora with the Living Bank.

Zamora said the field is tightly regulated and policed. You have to have the right blood type, the right tissue type, be the same approximate age, be healthy enough to survive and in the case of a heart transplant, be close by when the donor dies.

Organ procurement networks offer donated organs to registered recipients locally first. That is how the rich are different. They can travel short notice in say a private jet.

"Anybody can be listed in multiple areas. That has nothing to do with power, but it does have everything to do with your ability to get there quickly."

There is simply less competition for organs in some areas. There are 31,000 people who need hearts annually. There are roughly 2,000 hearts.

Morgan said he has posted a request on Facebook and has received offers to sell him one, mostly from overseas. That's tempting but illegal. He said when your life is on the line, you can get desperate.

"I want to stay alive. I wanna stay alive to see these grandchildren grow up."

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