The impact of country reimbursement programmes on living kidney donations.

INTRODUCTION: Living-donor kidney transplantation is the gold standard treatment for patients with end-stage kidney disease. However, potential donors ubiquitously face financial as well as logistical barriers. To remove these disincentives from living kidney donations, the governments of 23 countries have implemented reimbursement programmes that shift the burdens of non-medical costs from donors to the governments or private entities. However, scientific evidence for the effectiveness of these programmes is scarce. The present study investigates whether these reimbursement programmes designed to ease the financial and logistical barriers succeeded in increasing the number of living kidney donations at the country level. The study examined within-country variations in the timing of such reimbursement programmes. METHOD: The study applied the difference-in-difference (two-way panel fixed-effect) technique on the Poisson distribution to estimate the effects of these reimbursement programmes on a 17 year long (2000-2016) dataset covering 109 countries where living donor kidney transplants were performed. RESULTS: The results indicated that reimbursement programmes have a statistically significant positive effect. Overall, the model predicted that reimbursement programmes increased country-level donation numbers by a factor of 1.12-1.16. CONCLUSION: Reimbursement programmes may be an effective approach to alleviate the kidney shortage worldwide. Further analysis is warranted on the type of reimbursement programmes and the ethical dimension of each type of such programmes.

Coercion, dissatisfaction, and social stigma: an ethnographic study of compensated living kidney donation in Iran.

This article updates the qualitative research on Iran reported in the 2012 article by Tong et al. "The experiences of commercial kidney donors: thematic synthesis of qualitative research" (Tong et al. in Transpl Int 25:1138-1149, 2012). The basic approach used in the Tong et al. article is applied to a more recent and more comprehensive study of Iranian living organ donors, providing a clearer picture of what compensated organ donation is like in Iran since the national government began regulating compensated donation. Iran is the only country in the world where kidney selling is legal, regulated, and subsidized by the national government. This article focuses on three themes: (1) coercion and other pressures to donate, (2) donor satisfaction with their donation experience, and (3) whether donors fear social stigma. We found no evidence of coercion, but 68% of the paid living organ donors interviewed felt pressure to donate due to extreme poverty or other family pressures. Even though 27% of the living kidney donors interviewed said they were satisfied with their donation experience, 74% had complaints about the donation process or its results, including some of the donors who said they were satisfied. In addition, 84% of donors indicated they feared experiencing social stigma because of their kidney donation.

More regulation of industry-supported biomedical research: are we asking the right questions?

Industry-sponsored biomedical research is under the microscope. In an attempt to achieve just results in extraordinary cases, critics are suggesting regulations that would pervert the U.S. clinical trial process. However, the arguments made to justify such regulation are weak at best. All the proposals to regulate industry sponsorship of clinical trials that we surveyed (over a hundred articles and ten books, most written in the past decade) suffer from some form of fallacious reasoning. In the interest of advocating sound policy, this article points out some of the most common reasoning errors found in the literature on financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials.

A Revised Iranian Model of Organ Donation as an Answer to the Current Organ Shortage Crisis.

Kidney transplantation has become the treatment of choice for patients with end-stage renal disease. Six decades of success in the field of transplantation have made it possible to save thousands of lives every year. Unfortunately, in recent years success has been overshadowed by an ever-growing shortage of organs. In the United States, there are currently more than 100 000 patients waiting for kidneys. However, the supply of kidneys (combined cadaveric and live donations) has stagnated around 17 000 per year. The ever-widening gap between demand and supply has resulted in an illegal black market and unethical transplant tourism of global proportions. While we believe there is much room to improve the Iranian model of regulated incentivized live kidney donation, with some significant revisions, the Iranian Model could serve as an example for how other countries could make significant strides to lessening their own organ shortage crises.

A libertarian critique of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s The Foundations of Bioethics.

CONCLUSION: Although Engelhardt's The Foundations of Bioethics is an impressive work, it is plagued by problems of justification, conceptual confusion, and inconsistencies....A libertarian theory can arrive at the same basic requirements of mutual respect, autonomy, nonuse of force, and tolerance for a wide range of diverse life styles without relying on a lowest-common-denominator principle and without depriving fetuses, infants, and the mentally retarded of their status as persons. This can be done by taking a deontological approach to libertarian theory that denies that all moral beliefs are worthy of respect. Some beliefs, such as Engelhardt's belief that fetuses, infants, and the mentally retarded are nonpersons, simply fall beneath the floor of acceptable moral alternatives, even in a libertarian society, because such beliefs are based on a misunderstanding of personhood and violate the principle of mutual respect.