Unnecessary transplants boon for clinics at great cost to patients

The three-day special report by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters Andrew Conte and Luis Fabregas found that hundreds of patients each year undergo unnecessary liver transplants. The story cites national data for transplants at 127 hospitals across the nation between 2002 and 2006. The reporters looked at MELD scores—a government-approved standard used to determine how urgently a patient needs a liver— to see how sick transplant patients were and how patients with the least urgent conditions fared post-surgery.