Whistleblower says U.S. organ transplants corrupted by greed and bias

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Whistleblower says U.S. organ transplants corrupted by greed and bias

A former kidney transplant program director says the system has been driven by financial incentives that risk patient safety.

September 17, 2025
By Peter Whoriskey
In early 2020, a director of the kidney transplant program at Parkland Health in Dallas noticed a problem. Patients were languishing on the waiting list for donated kidneys. One patient, he said, had waited nine years for a kidney transplant, and by that time he had become too sick for the procedure. Others died waiting.

“No one should have to wait that long,” he said in a recent interview.

He told hospital executives at the time that the delays arose because organs intended for patients at Parkland, which serves a disproportionate share of poor people, were being redirected to patients at nearby UT Southwestern Medical Center, a prestigious academic hospital caring for a more affluent population.

“I observed Parkland patients get passed over and the same organs go to patients at UT Southwestern,” said the program director, Patrek Chase. “This forced many of our patients to continue long-term dialysis while languishing on the transplant wait list.”

According to a presentation Chase made to hospital executives in early 2020 that The Washington Post reviewed, at least 36 times in the previous year, kidneys had become available to Parkland patients, but the transplants didn’t happen because doctors said there was a problem with the donated organ. Evaluating and rejecting donated organs is a normal part of the transplant process. But in those 36 cases, doctors subsequently transplanted the same organ into a patient at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he said.

The allegations are part of a wide-ranging whistleblower lawsuit brought by Chase, an industry veteran with 15 years experience at transplant centers and organ procurement groups, who said the way the United States collects and distributes life-saving organs has been corrupted by greed, lax oversight and methods designed to maximize payments from Medicare.

Chase’s lawsuit takes aim at all three nodes of the organ transplant system: the nonprofit groups that solicit and procure organ donations; the government contractor that maintains the waiting list of hopeful recipients; and the transplant centers where the operations are done. In his telling, all three have been corrupted by financial incentives.

Representatives at Parkland and UT Southwestern hospitals declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Scientists have long noted that people of lower socioeconomic status have more trouble getting transplants, but given the medical complexities, it can be difficult to infer bias from any particular set of statistics, according to doctors who have studied the phenomenon.

Chase’s insider account nevertheless adds to the controversy surrounding the national system, the complex infrastructure supporting a multibillion-dollar business in transplants. Under a 1972 law, Medicare insurance pays for nearly all of the kidney transplants performed in the United States, which numbered nearly 28,000 in 2024.

In 2022, a Senate Finance Committee report blamed 70 deaths on mistakes in the screening of organs and noted widespread deficiencies in the system. More recently, government investigators found that at least 28 times, an organ procurement group serving Kentucky and parts of West Virginia and Ohio may have initiated organ recovery before the patient was confirmed dead.

“The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in July.

The Justice Department, which reviews whistleblower lawsuits alleging waste of government money, has spent two years investigating the allegations, according to Chase’s attorney, Sam Buffone.

“We have been heartened by the strong reform [of the organ transplant system] from the Trump administrations and the aggressive oversight by Congress,” Buffone said.

The government has yet to join Chase in the whistleblower case, however. Under federal laws intended to punish businesses for defrauding the government, the Justice Department could intervene and seek three times damages plus a penalty.

“We hope this administration will aggressively investigate and join our fight in the future,” Buffone said.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.

Criticism of organ procurement groups, ‘vultures’
At the beginning of the transplant process are the groups that procure organs from donors, and Chase has taken aim at three of them that he has worked for or with. He alleges that the three — LiveOnNY, NJ Sharing Network and Southwest Transplant Alliance — were so focused on maximizing reimbursements that they collected hundreds of organs that were not viable for transplant because the guaranteed Medicare reimbursement for kidneys gives them a financial incentive to do so. About 33 percent of the kidneys those groups collect are discarded because they were not viable, according to the lawsuit. The average discard rate, according to some researchers, is about 22 percent.

Organ recovery teams from Southwest Transplant Alliance were so aggressive in their collection practices that they were called “vultures” by Parkland hospital staff, he alleges in the lawsuit. In one harrowing incident he describes, a Parkland patient was brought to an operating room for organ recovery by Southwest Transplant Alliance. He was “not actually deceased,” Chase alleges. The Parkland doctors intervened to stop the organ recovery, according to the lawsuit.