Alcoholics should not be subject to deprioritization on a liver transplant waiting list if the belief is held that alcoholism is a disease and not an issue of moral failure for which the patient should be blamed.
The implementation of breakthrough quality improvement initiatives has been successful in closing the gap between the number of organs that are available and the number of patients who need them.
Katrina A. Bramstedt, PhD and Francis L. Delmonico, MD
Transplant centers cannot regulate how people establish relationships, but when a donor-recipient pair comes together through Internet solicitation, the center must assess the donor’s motivations carefully.
Patients seeking IVF are highly motivated to become parents and may wish to preserve financial resources for surrogacy or adoption should IVF not succeed, so risk sharing appeals to them, which makes its high cost especially problematic.
Efforts to meet the demand for organs have long had disproportionate effects on members of particular races, not only because of disparate levels of need for transplants but because of the way our donation system works.