The Numbers Game

Around 40% of fruits and vegetables grown on farms are discarded before they reach consumers for no other reason than they are unsightly. Imperfect produce is deemed unsellable, so it is not even sold, resulting in massive waste. Who wants a crooked apple, right? Probably a lot of people, but that's beside the point. This attitude appears to apply to human organs as well.

With a change in federal standards in 2007, imperfect organs, by whatever metric one uses to determine such a label, began to be turned away. This was essentially a business decision. Imperfect organs, like a severely ill recipient, necessitate higher-risk surgeries. The more dangerous a surgery is, the less likely it is to succeed. If a hospital performs too many unsuccessful surgeries, its ranking suffers and it receives less federal funding. So, in order to maintain their high ratings, they simply perform fewer transplants and only perform "sure thing" surgeries.

This viewpoint contradicts the purpose of transplant surgeries in the first place, as well as the notion that the sickest people deserve the organs first. Following the publication of a report outlining this, standards were changed to allow hospitals to have more surgical failures without losing funding, but it still appears to be a metric by which funding is gauged.