A Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation finds that hundreds of patients undergo liver transplants every year when they do not need them. Many of those who undergo the transplants die.
The Tribune-Review reports:
One in 10 of those patients dies when they could have lived longer without the transplant. The rest -- all at the rock-bottom of waiting lists -- must resign themselves to an early battle with the burdensome risks of anti-rejection drugs and complications that can follow: infections, cancers, kidney damage, and high blood sugar.
What's worse, a third of those patients get the worst available livers, organs sometimes rejected by surgeons for thousands of sicker patients across the country.
The project is remarkable, not just for its content but for its online display as well.
Part three of the project examines the money behind the transplants:
"This is big money," said Dr. Claude Earl Fox, former head of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration from 1997 to 2001.
"You have medical ethics competing with medical economics," said Fox, who is now director of the Florida Public Health Institute. "A lot of transplant surgeons and centers out there are ethical, but you’ve got economics on the other side that really weighs heavily on them. It's a real struggle over what they're going to do."
