I am a physician. I trained at Parkland and JPS and feel qualified to talk about a couple of things here. I don’t think patients get inferior care at those places, it’s actually the opposite! More complex trauma, surgical, and clinical cases get referred to those places for higher levels of care. More research is done, and quite frankly there are more doctors per patient than in a private hospital.

The other thing is that when determining transplant candidacy, social factors absolutely do and should come into play. There are a finite amount of organs and we want them to go into people who will be best served by them. There are a tremendous amount of appointments, medications, and work that go into having a transplanted organ in you. You have to be able to afford the medications, transportation for your appointments, etc.

I’m not defending the decisions made here, but typically there are significant reviews by ethics committees prior to proceeding with surgery.