Lawmaker says lung transplant fight reveals ‘brave new world’ of federal control

A federal judge ultimately struck down the rule and forced Sebelius to place Murnaghan on the adult waiting list. On Wednesday morning, Murnaghan’s family said Sarah is undergoing a life-saving transplant operation.

{mosads}On the House floor Wednesday, McClintock blasted Sebelius for failing to take steps herself to help save Murnaghan’s life, and criticized Sebelius for telling Congress that she would not intervene in the case.

“Her warm words of sympathy for Sarah and her family at a congressional hearing last week were horrific: some live and some die,” McClintock said. “The incident provided all of us with a chilling look at what healthcare will be like when bureaucrats like Kathleen Sebelius are making more and more of our healthcare decisions.”

While Sebelius said the government should not pick winners and losers in these cases, McClintock said Murnaghan’s family was only asking for the government to get out of the way of decisions that should be made by doctors. Murnaghan’s doctors said she was eligible for an adult lung, a recommendation that was blocked by the HHS rule.

“That’s what bureaucracies do,” McClintock said. “They choose who wins and who loses, who wins and who dies, and they do so in a blind, cold, unthinking and unreasonable manner.”

He said passage of ObamaCare will put millions more health decisions into the control of the federal government.

“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,” he said.

“I am afraid in coming years we will pay dearly for that duplicity, as we move ever closer to the brave new world of bureaucratically controlled healthcare that we can already see so clearly through a 10-year-old’s life or death battle with the federal bureaucracy.”