[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 8728]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1010
                  THE ``SOME LIVE AND SOME DIE'' CZAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, last week, the Nation learned of the 
plight of Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old who will die within weeks 
unless she gets a desperately needed lung transplant. There are no 
pediatric lungs available, but there may be adult lungs, which her 
doctors say would be entirely satisfactory for her condition. But 
because she's nearly 11 years old and not 12, the bureaucratic 
regulations prohibited it.
  As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius could 
have modified those regulations to conform to the judgment of the 
doctors, but she wouldn't. Her warm words of sympathy for Sarah and her 
family at a Congressional hearing last week were horrific: ``some live 
and some die.'' Fortunately, a Federal judge intervened and concluded 
what Sebelius wouldn't, that the regulations are arbitrary and 
capricious. Thank God, Sarah is now on the adult transplant list, but 
the incident provided all of us with a chilling look at what health 
care will be like when bureaucrats like Kathleen Sebelius are making 
more and more of our health care decisions.
  Sebelius constructed a straw man to argue with. She said that we 
shouldn't have public officials making these choices, and a lung 
provided to Sarah necessarily means a lung denied to someone else. That 
is utterly disingenuous. Sarah's family, joined by many Members of the 
House, were not calling for Sebelius to pick winners or losers but, 
rather, were calling for her to place the judgment of the doctors ahead 
of the rigid one-size-fits-all diktats of the Federal bureaucracy in 
all such cases, not just this one.
  The fact is, Ms. Sebelius is picking who lives and who dies. The 
difference is that she is doing so not by deferring to the judgment of 
doctors but, rather, by conforming to the cold and rigid regulations 
that cannot discern between individual cases.
  This is the process to which we are about to consign every American 
as government dictates every detail of their health coverage: sorry, 
you're a few months too young or too old. Tough luck, some live and 
some die.
  My chief of staff grew up in the Soviet Union where the first 
question asked when an ambulance was called was, ``Well, how old is the 
patient?'' That's what bureaucracies do. They choose who wins and who 
loses, who lives and who dies, and they do so in a blind, cold, 
unthinking, and unreasonable manner.
  The fact is we don't want officials making these choices, which is 
exactly what Ms. Sebelius is doing. Those decisions should not involve 
the government but, rather, should be determined by the individual 
judgment of the professional physicians directly involved. Until the 
court stepped in, that's what this administration was impeding. And 
that shouldn't surprise us. This is the same administration that has 
substituted the individual medical insurance choices once made by 
families with the one-size-fits-all mandates of the very same Federal 
officials who dismissively tell dying 10-year-olds ``some live and some 
die.''
  Mr. Speaker, this incident was a dire warning to us all of the danger 
that lies ahead for every American. Remember that the same IRS that 
abused its fearsome authority to harass and intimidate ordinary 
Americans for political reasons next year will have the power to 
enforce the regulations over our families' choice of health plans under 
ObamaCare.
  Mr. Speaker, each of us as Americans may one day face the same peril 
as Sarah Murnaghan because of what we set in motion by empowering this 
government to take an ever-widening role in our health care decisions. 
We have taken a process that once was determined by individual choice 
and was once guided by the professional judgment of the physicians who 
actually gathered around the patient's bed and turned those decisions 
over to the likes of Kathleen Sebelius.
  I'm afraid in coming years we will pay dearly for that duplicity as 
we move ever closer toward the ``Brave New World'' of bureaucratically 
controlled health care that we can already see so clearly through a 10-
year-old's life-or-death battle with the Federal bureaucracy.

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