Palin is right again….Judge saves 10-year-old from the one-woman death panel

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Dan Calabrese:

Not that she’ll get credit for it, but when Sarah Palin warned of “death panels” resulting from the constructs of ObamaCare, this is exactly what she meant: Someone needs something or they’re going to die, and some government bureaucrat who values the systemic ramifications of the matter above all else, gets to decide what will happen.

In this case, DHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made her decision: She would not intervene to save the life of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, a cystic fibrosis patient from Pennsylvania. Sarah is, as I write this, weeks away from death if she doesn’t get a lung transplant. That, you’d think, would serve as a call to action for anyone who might be able to make the transplant happen. But not Kathleen Sebelius, because adults are also waiting for lungs, and the rules say no one under 12 can be prioritized over adults.

Sebelius claimed rules are rules and she had no authority to intervene, despite a letter from several members of Congress asserting that she absolutely does (including two from Pennsylvania). Sebelius did trouble herself to “order a policy review,” but she refused to take action to save Sarah’s life.

Fortunately, District Court Judge Michael Baylson issued a restraining order prohibiting Sebelius from applying the policy that will block Sarah from getting the lung transplant. CNN reports:

Janet Murnaghan, Sarah’s mother, said the family is “thrilled … literally jumping for joy.”

In a written statement, the family added, “We are experiencing many emotions — relief, happiness, gratitude and, for the first time in months, hope.”

Where someone is placed on the adult lung transplant list depends on several factors — blood type, distance from donor to potential recipient, and a lung allocation score. The score is derived from medical factors like test results and the patient’s diagnosis.

Sarah’s parents said her score is a 78. Anything above 60 is considered a high score, according to reports published on the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network website.

The Murnaghans had argued that since the number of children’s lungs available through organ donation programs is so small, Sarah — and other pediatric patients like her — should be added to the list of people waiting for adult lungs, prioritized by severity of their illnesses.

Now let’s be clear about exactly what happened here. A policy was put in place by the federal government that said certain people would take priority over others for transplants. When a person proved to be in desperate need of such a transplant – a matter of life and death – a cabinet-level government official refused to intervene, citing the rules, citing limits on her own authority and saying it would take too long at any rate to change the policy.

Lungs are available. A 10-year-old girl needs one or she will die. But a government policy says she can’t have one and no one will do anything to set aside or get around the policy so a 10-year-old girl will not die. Or at least no one would until Judge Baylson came along, thank God.

This is the death panel.

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Sebelius has ignored laws and judicial orders before.
Look to her to drag her feet.

Also look to this to be politicized into access to medical treatment becoming a popularity contest.
People will be saying, not that the ranking of children for lungs was inherently unfair, but that her win in court makes the cute or photogenic, the squeaky wheel or the otherwise favored to be the new standard for who lives and who dies.
Either type of ”death panel,” is a death panel.
the rest of the civilized world does include children in ranking them for a new lung, unlike the USA now.

It is rather like the Left’s earth worshipers making a bigger deal about elephants or rhinos going extinct over frogs or turtles.
And, lo and behold, the terrorists of the world are poaching tusks from elephants and rhinos at such a pace to fund terrorism, that both species are going to be extinct (in the wild) very soon.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/06/06/with-elephant-and-rhino-tusks-helping-to-fund-terror-networks-extinction-is-imminent/
But earth worshipers are not going to put their money where their mouths are and stand and defend those tusked beasts in their wild homes….that’s for someone else to do.

@Nan G:

And, lo and behold, the terrorists of the world are poaching tusks from elephants and rhinos at such a pace to fund terrorism, that both species are going to be extinct (in the wild) very soon.

McCain, Graham and Christie had tusks? Those poachers really did a good job removing them, you can’t even tell.

I have conflicted feelings about this. first. I read the law and although they are not named so, there are ‘death panels’ in the law. Second my daughters were once 10 and regardless their age if they were going to die if they did not receive some type of treatment, I would fight to my death to perserve their life. Third. what about the people that are and have been on the list and now will be pushed down because of this young girl. fourth. what about others? I heard this morning another young girl’s parents are fighting for a lung for their daughter. We know this is only going to escalate.

Lastly please remember when the obamadeathcare law is fully implemented someone like sebelius will be determing whether you get care, live or die. She is NOT qualified to make these decisions nor is it likely that anyone on the ‘panel’ will be qualified. She was appointed to her current post because of her butt kissing obama during the first election. I lived in Kansas when she was the KS insurance commissoner and the KS governor AND she sucked at both jobs.

There is a solution to this. The problem here is statism, socialism.

The solution is free market. People own their own bodies, let them make arrangements to sell their own organs.