Posted on 06/04/2013 6:35:23 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Portrait of a bureaucratic nightmare: A little girl’s dying from cystic fibrosis and has three to five weeks to live unless she gets a lung transplant before then. The good news is that adult lungs can be modified for a child her age in a way that’ll save her life — except that, because she’s only 10, she’s not eligible for them. The “adult” list starts at 12; everyone younger than that goes to the children’s list, where lungs are much harder to come by. The question is, does Sebelius have the authority to suspend those age limitations and make the girl, Sarah Murnaghan, eligible for an adult transplant?
I honestly don’t know the answer. Murnaghan’s parents say Sebelius’s authority is clear; Sebelius herself claims that HHS’s lawyers have told her she can’t do it. A life hangs in the balance. On one side:
[U]nder existing policy all adults in the region with her blood type will be offered the lungs first, her parents say, even those more stable and with less severe conditions. The girl’s parents called for a change in the policy after their appeal was denied…
United Network for Organ Sharing, also a nonprofit under contract with the government, said a committee would review the policy and the public would have a chance to comment on any proposed changes. But spokeswoman Anne Paschke said any changes most likely won’t come quickly enough to benefit Sarah or others like her.
“The policy development process is not fast,” she said in an email to The Associated Press. “Organ allocation policies are created to transplant as many people as possible overall, result in the fewest waiting list deaths overall and result in the best possible survival overall. In developing policies, committees and the board weigh data, medical evidence and experience, and public input.”
On the other:
Dr. Stuart Sweet from St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who helped write the pediatric transplant system, said the case ‘tugs at his heart’ but that no system is perfect.
He said that if he changed the system for Sarah’s advantage, ‘there’s another patient, very likely an adolescent, who gets a disadvantage‘.
That’s the key question, right? If you waive the rules and bump her up the adult list, does someone else die because they’re forced to keep waiting? And the other question is, why is someone on the children’s list if a modified adult lung would save them? I don’t understand offhand using a fixed age cutoff instead of a qualitative assessment of each patient to maximize their odds of a transplant. If an adult organ would work for her and there are more adult organs to be had, that’s the list she should be on. Sebelius herself seems sufficiently troubled by this to have ordered a review of transplant protocols.
I’m flagging this for you now just because, with the attention paid to it by GOP congressmen in today’s hearing (Tom Price pressed Sebelius on it too) and with Drudge picking it up this afternoon, there’s a chance it’s going to be blow up in the media in the next few days. Now you’re caught up on the background. And no matter what happens, Ace is right that having the head of HHS telling Congress “someone lives and someone dies” is poisonous optics with the public already sour on ObamaCare. Good luck with your 2014 strategy, Democrats.
Given that neither healthcare or euthanasia are listed among the limited powers which the states have delegated to the feds via the Constitution, most of those power listed in Section 8 of Article I, nobody in the federal government has the authority to address such issues imo.
Fruit Cake.
They won’t call them “Death Panels” but that’s what they are. In Newspeak, they’ll be “Quality of Life Boards” or something.
I just don’t get this. Does the government now have power over the donor program? The criteria in the past for heart and lung transplants have been compatibility, blood type, weight, height, and emergency priority.
Can’t agree.
Fruit cakes, at least most of the time, do not result in the death of children.
In this case, it seems that Death Panel Sebelius will.
PS -- nice looking teeth, scumbag. This little girl just wants to live. You think your re-made teeth make you more attractive. It didn't.
Obviously an eeeeevil one-percenter.
Sebelius is evil. God’s judgement cannot come too soon for her.
You gotta remember that bureaucrats make the rules for one-size-fits-all. So what if a kid dies? Think of it as a late-late term abortion. Heartless bastards.
You are talking out of your butt.
If this little girl dies, she is going to be the first victim of Obamacare, and I suspect that there will be many, many others.
You know what really bothers me. The man who murdered the soldier in Britain and then gave a little speech on camera after said your government don’t care about you -paraphrase.
He’s right.
They do not care at all.
I do not know what to make of this considering who said that, but I cannot think of a way to argue against it :(
NO! This is what Doctor Mengele’s daughter looks like!
Like the top Nazi doctor did at Auschwitz (my friend and her sister were almost chosen for his experiments, the older sister later being killed there with her mother), it was “To the Left” (to live for a while as laborers) and “To the Right” (to die in the gas chambers), so too did Sebelius just do it to young children today.
It is now “Under 12 to the Right” (to die) and “Over 12 to the Left (to live a little longer).
Seig Heil Katherine. You missed your place in history by a few years but at least you are trying to make up for it.
Cancer would be too kind a death for you! You are PURE EVIL, but then, again, you serve Obama, which explains it all. Sold your soul for some power, Just another “Good German”.
FUKS
Sebelius must have found out this family votes Republican, otherwise they would do everything in their power to save this child..welcome to Death Panels, gee guess Sarah Palin was right all along, yet she was called every name in the book for being RIGHT
So, what if the people who are in the chain involved with transplant decisions simply ignored Sebelius and went ahead with transplanting when an adult set of lungs became available? Would Sebelius show up to remove those lungs?
Maybe there is another place to look, not every Republican or Democrat contributes money to a particular party, but there must be a place to find out how this family votes..the Obama Administration already knows how they vote, which makes me believe that is why they are refusing to help this child
Too bad they decided to execute Terri Schiavo, to prove a point.
Death with dignity,is the goal right?
The child hasn’t received a transplant because there hasn’t been a set of lungs available to fit. People are just assuming that any old lungs will do. I know people that have been on the table all set to get a tx and for one reason or another donor lungs were no acceptable.
It’s a good thing Chris Kringle didn’t make this statement.
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