As 80,000 await transplants, door to paying donors may open.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

MIAMI _ Michael Ritchie, 45, has spent two months ''hooked to a lot of machines'' in a Jackson Memorial Hospital bed, waiting for a new heart. ''I have faith in the Lord,'' he says, ``and I have faith in my doctors.''

The problem is that no one has faith that enough people will donate their organs to keep people like Ritchie alive.

The shortage of available organs is so severe that some experts are proposing a radical solution: paying for organs _ giving money to the relatives of the recently deceased.

The hope is that the move would help the 80,000 people waiting for transplants. That's up from 20,000 in 1990. Last year, 6,238 Americans died while on the transplant waiting list, and many more became so sick that they were removed from the list before they died.

At present, paying anything for organs is illegal, and many transplant surgeons think payment is morally wrong. But as the waiting list has lengthened, a growing segment of the medical establishment is willing to at least explore the idea.

This summer, delegates of the American Medical Association voted to support a study to see whether payments would ease the shortage. Several bills in Congress propose changing the 1984 law that forbids payments for organs. ''The organ shortage we are experiencing is not mandated by nature,'' writes David L. Kaserman, an economist at Auburn University and the recipient of two kidney transplants. ...