A whistleblower in Dallas has filed a lawsuit containing disturbing allegations about the organ donation industry.
Patrek Chase, kidney transplant program director at Parkland Health in Dallas, claimed that patients at his hospital – which generally serves a poorer population – were passed over for a healthy organ in favor of patients at UT Southwestern Medical Center, which generally helps the affluent.
Peter Whoriskey, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, spoke to the Texas Standard about the allegations.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You begin your story centering around a whistleblower in the healthcare field working at Parkland Health in Dallas. Can you say more about who this person is and what he noticed that led him down this path?
Peter Whoriskey: He was the administrative director for the kidney transplant program at Parkland hospital, and he noticed something that disturbed him quite a bit. He noticed that there was, over and over again, patients on the Parkland waiting list for kidneys being passed over and those kidneys were then going into patients at UT Southwestern.
In fact, he found 36 times in one year that there was an organ that could have gone to help somebody at the Parkland hospital waiting list, that the doctors at the time said, no, this kidney’s not good enough or the donor is not good enough. But then they decided that it was good enough to put into somebody at UT Southwestern.
And he began to think and crop this up to Parkland executives, he said. And nothing got done.
He also noticed that it was the same doctors were covering transplants at UT Southwestern and at Parkland. And they were the ones who were saying, on the one hand, this kidney is not good enough for the Parkland patient, but it is good enough for the UT Southwestern patient. And he was concerned.
Who does Parkland serve?
Yeah, I think I read somewhere that it has more poor patients than any other hospital in Texas. Around 60-something percent of them were either on Medicaid or they were just straight-up charity cases that the hospital covered. So they were, generally speaking, poor people.
Can you explain how various entities involved in organ donation can profit from this process?
I mean, obviously, the hospital makes money from doing transplants at their hospital. They also make a lot of money on testing.
And there’s also these groups called the organ procurement groups. They all have financial incentives, you know, to work and do these transplants.
So explain to me then what seems to be going on – and I understand that there’s some legal action happening as a result of this whistleblower activity?
Exactly. Now this guy that who is at Parkland, his name is Patrek Chase, this is somebody who knows the industry pretty well. He’s been 15 years in it, and his lawsuit sort of takes aim at a lot of these groups.
I mean, there’s a lot good work being done and a lot lives being saved. But at the same time there’s been numerous complaints and allegations about the way the transplants are being done.
In fact, just yesterday, the HHS Secretary, RFK Jr., basically closed down the group in Miami that was doing organ procurement, which was another thing that pops up in Patrek Chase’s lawsuit.
So what specifically is Patrek Chase alleging with his lawsuit?
Well, it’s actually very broad. It takes aim at Parkland Hospital, at UT Southwestern, at a place he worked at in Illinois, an organ procurement group in New York, another in New Jersey, and at the Southwest Transplant Alliance, which is the organ procurement group in Dallas.
His broad claim is that the system is driven too many times by greed – and in the case of the Parkland/Southwestern kidneys, bias against Parkland. Or I mean, you could put it in a positive way, you could take favoritism toward UT Southwest.
What about the health care groups named as defendants in this lawsuit? Did they talk to you for this story?
No, neither UT Southwestern or Parkland talked to me. Citing the litigation, they didn’t want to engage with me.
Are there regulatory bodies supposed to oversee the ins and outs of the organ donation industry?
Yes. Health and Human Services, the federal government. One of the things that a lot of people may or may not realize is that basically Medicare pays for every single kidney transplant in the country.
We all know Medicare is the program that provides for the medical needs of people over 65, but they also cover everybody with end-stage kidney disease, and as a result they pay for all kidney transplants.
There’s basically nonprofits covering every inch of the United States that are given a government-granted monopoly to do organ procurement – that is, like, they’re the ones who go get your organs if you’re an organ donor, and then they in turn bring those to the transplant centers. And if it’s a kidney, it’s all paid for by the government.
You say nonprofit, and I think, well, what about this financial motive then? What’s the idea there? If they’re nonprofits, how is greed a factor here?
Well, just to sustain their nonprofit, they’re trying to build up their company. He makes claims that there are luxe office buildings and salaries.
And in some cases that I’ve seen, actually in the Miami case or a lot of those cases, that the people are abusing the payment system. That’s one of the reasons that they closed the Miami place.
Is it clear what the next shoe to drop might be? What happens next with this lawsuit?
It isn’t clear. It’s called a qui tam or whistleblower lawsuit. And in those cases, the government can join if they feel like the government has been ripped off in a substantial way.
So far, they haven’t joined. They could still, but at this point it’s just Patrek Chase against the seven or so entities that he’s sued.
If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.
