The hospital that calls itself New Jersey’s premier heart transplant center, Newark Beth Israel, inflated survival rates to keep its funding — in at least one instance by keeping a brain-dead patient on life support until he hit a one-year survival benchmark, startling new reporting revealed.

Family members were never told that Navy veteran Darryl Young was in an irreversible vegetative state after his heart transplant last year, and staff never offered hospice, other palliative care services or a Do Not Resuscitate directive, ProPublica revealed.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, doctors were secretly recorded discussing how Young needed to be aggressively cared for despite their belief that he would never wake up or recover function, the ProPublica report said.

“How dare you take it upon yourself to withhold such information from any family,” Young’s daughter, Taccara Beale, told ProPublica.

A total of four instances were found of doctors allegedly manipulating the survival stats.

In addition to the Navy vet’s case, doctors were recorded mentioned in passing an unnamed female lung transplant patient for whom the mission was to “Keep that lady alive,” ahead of a survival-rate reporting deadline, as Dr. Mark Zucker, director of the hospital’s heart and lung transplant programs, was recorded saying.

Yosry Awad told ProPublica that he was successfully treated for a blood pressure issue in May, just two weeks before his one-year heart transplant anniversary. Hospital staff, apparently worried something could go wrong at the last minute, had him stay an extra, unnecessary weekend “to hit his one-year-anniversary,” according to a medical record obtained by ProPublica.

But the Navy vet’s case was extreme.

“Need to keep him alive till June 30 at a minimum,” Zucker was recorded saying of Young, referring to the date when the hospital would next need to report patient survival rates to federal Medicare and Medicaid officials, the report said.

The hospital had suffered a recent downturn in its heart transplant survival rates, threatening its federal funding, the report said.

“This is a very, very unethical, immoral but unfortunately very practical solution,” Zucker was recorded saying.

“Because the reality here is that you haven’t saved anybody if your program gets shut down.”

The hospital kept Young on a ventilator and feeding tube, and aggressively treated him for exactly a year as he suffered pneumonia, strokes, seizures and a dangerous fungal infection, ProPublica found.

“Deeply disturbing,” Young’s sister Andrea told ProPublica, upon learning that doctors at Newark Beth Israel had been secretly taped talking about a deadline for keeping him admitted and alive.

It was a month after his Sept. 20, 2018, surgery before hospital staff had even grudgingly conceded that Young had suffered brain damage at all, and only after Andrea asked why he still wasn’t waking up.

“I asked, ‘Which part of the brain?’ And [a cardiologist] said, ‘Every part, but just a very small part of each section,’ and that gave me hope. Now I know it was false hope.”

Only three days before the one-year anniversary of Young’s transplant surgery was she told that the hospital was finally discharging him, and that she needed to look into finding him a long-term care facility, ProPublica found.

Newark Beth Israel told ProPublica in a statement that, in response to the concerns raised, it is “conducting an evaluation and review of the program, its processes and its leadership.”

The hospital also told ProPublica that its transplant program “has saved countless lives” and consistently met or exceeded all regulatory guidelines to maintain funding and certification, including providing one-year survival rates.

The hospital is clearly proud of its heart transplant program, boasting in the second paragraph of its website homepage, under the heading “An Innovator in New Jersey Healthcare”: “Newark Beth Israel is home to one of the nation’s 10 largest heart transplant centers, RWJBarnabas Health’s Heart Failure Treatment and Transplant Program.”