Some U.S. Transplant Centers Substandard

About one-fifth of federally funded U.S. transplant programs fail to meet the government’s minimum standards, The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

The newspaper said its reporters discovered Medicare allows 20 percent of the 236 programs in the United States to remain open despite performing too few operations or having unacceptably low survival rates.

The Times said it found Medicare and Medicaid have allowed 48 heart, liver and lung transplant centers to continue operating, despite sometimes glaring and repeated lapses.

There are 236 approved transplant centers nationwide.

The bottom line message is that there are too many programs in the United States that need to be shut down, said Dr. Mark Barr, president of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.

Medicare funds most of the nation’s transplant centers and requires each to perform a minimum number of transplants and achieve a specific survival rate to be certified for funding.

The Times said Medicare has decertified 11 centers since 2000, but in nearly all of those cases the centers had voluntarily ceased operating before the Medicare action.

The newspaper said in one case, the center’s decertification came eight months after the program was terminated.