[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 19571]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              HEALTH CARE

  (Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute.)
  Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, in an interview in The New 
York Times earlier this year, President Obama discussed the difficult 
decision that he and his family faced to replace his grandmother's hip 
after she broke it after she was terminally diagnosed with cancer. In 
that interview, he said, ``Whether, in the aggregate society making 
those decisions to give my grandmother or everyone else's aging parents 
a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, 
is a very difficult decision. There is going to have to be a 
conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then 
there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation 
that takes place.''
  With all due respect, Mr. President, I think that this is a 
conversation that would be best left between the doctor and the 
patient. We don't need a government plan. We don't need government 
bureaucrats standing in the way of this relationship. We don't need 
them out their rationing out what care is best in this relationship. 
And so I, for one, reject the idea that government bureaucrats will 
make better decisions about health care than the doctors and the 
patient. So any proposal that seeks to ration care in such a way should 
be opposed, and I will do so every single time.

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