Absolutely no medical rationing

[BP]

I'm not familiar with lungs but I highly doubt the list is for the whole country. Organ viability is limited by time so there are different lists broken down geographically.

Exactly. That and there also has to be a surgery and harvest team available, as well as a perfectly prepped patient before you get lungs. You can sit in a hospital for weeks and get wheeled to surgery and put under while waiting for the organs, only to find out they weren't viable for some reason. Hospitals make mistakes, people get lost, there is traffic. Lots of variables can stop it from happening.

They don't just harvest lungs in California and send them on a private jet across the country because someone famous needs them. If are out of a few hours range by ambulance or not within helicopter range they probably aren't available.

[Forever_frost]

Exactly. It's also mentioned that there are 40 other urgent patients who need those lungs, too. You can't please all the people all the time. In this case, some are going to die. Tragic, but why should they bend the rules and gamble even more than usual while telling another person on the list that they are SOL, even if the lungs would fit them better?

From first glance, this seems like emotion fueling political opinion.

It was also mentioned she's at the top of the list for the child lungs and the doctors are confident that an adult one will work for her but regulations won't permit it. She's already been on the list, is at the top but she's not permitted what doctors say will work

[DallasSleeper]

Judge Rules in Favor of Pa. Girl Who Needs Lung
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSto...7#.Ua-4NZxBjdo
A federal judge in Philadelphia has made a dying 10-year-old eligible to seek donor lungs from an adult transplant list. U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson says he is granting the temporary request because of the severity of Sarah Murnaghan's condition.

Her mother, Janet Murnaghan, says the family is thrilled by the ruling. It's in effect until a June 14 court hearing. The family is challenging organ transplant rules that say children under age 12 must wait for pediatric lungs to become available. The Murnaghans say that rarely happens.

Sarah's doctors believe they can perform a successful transplant with adult lungs. Sarah has been hospitalized at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months with end-stage cystic fibrosis.

On Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declined to intervene.

[Forever_frost]

Bingo. Patient: 1 Death Panel: 0

[Broncojohnny]

I just have a real hard time with a politician making any sort of decision like this. These decisions should be made by doctors. In this particular case the government may be absolutely correct. But you can't trust it to function correctly on any of the others. These idiots could fuck up a wet dream.

[sc281]

Interesting read. Dems get the rules changed while Not Dems get to die.

http://www.redstate.com/2013/06/05/the-real-danger-of-liberal-bias/

The Real Danger of Liberal Bias
It's That the Powerful Keep Winning and the Weak Keep Losing

UPDATE: A federal judge has now intervened and ordered Sarah Murnaghan be put on the adult transplant list.]

I’m going to tell you what media bias is really all about. It’s about a dying, 10 year-old girl and a sexagenarian, politically connected trial lawyer. It’s about official malfeasance treated as human error when a Democrat is President. It’s about power and systemic corruption that is unremarkable to people offended that George W. Bush didn’t call his advisers liars to their face.

It is about Fred Baron and Sarah Murnaghan.

Fred Baron was a plaintiff’s asbestos lawyer, a prolific Democratic bundler, a man who made a great deal of money by breaking Fortune 500 companies (possibly through subornation of perjury), a personal friend of former Presidential candidate John “Baby Daddy” Edwards and of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and in 2008, a man dying of multiple myeloma. At 61, Baron had become one of the Democrats’ foremost source of trial lawyer funds, and they rewarded him with access and influence.

Politics as usual, really.

Where this story diverts from the usual depressing tale of money and influence is in the closing days of Baron’s life. Stage 5 cancer of any kind is a bad day; stage 5 multiple myeloma, as Baron (somewhat ironically, given his profession) had is a death sentence. Because Baron had the luxury of being rich, he spent a great deal on doctors to discover what the rest of us would know: he was a dead man walking.

However, his doctors believed that Tysabri — a monoclonal antibody that is used primarily to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases (by killing or impeding the movement of dysfunctional white blood cells that would otherwise attack the brain) — might save Baron’s life. (The mechanism for this is more complicated, but essentially, they were hoping the drug would slow or block the cancer cells through the same mechanism that the drug worked on autoimmune diseases.)

The problem of course was that the Food and Drug Administration had not cleared the drug for use on cancer patients. The drug’s manufacturer had the drug in what are called Phase I trials — the first part of the labyrinthine approval process for a drug that makes us one of the slowest drug approval regimes among modern societies — for use in treating multiple myeloma. The drug’s manufacturer could not approve the drug’s use out of the very limited number of test patients receiving it, and the drug would be at best 5-7 years from broad market use. (Really, that would likely be its turnaround time to Phase III trials, which have a much broader number of patients.)

Fred Baron did not have five years to live.

His family mounted a public and private campaign to get the manufacturer to allow Baron to use the drug. The manufacturer balked because allowing use outside of the trials can set back or destroy your chances for FDA approval (extra mortality, illegal use, and just general persnickitiness apply).

Enter Nancy Pelosi. Through means to which we have never been privy, Ms. Pelosi got the FDA to give the manufacturer the all-clear to give Baron the drug. Baron got the drug, Baron took the drug, Baron died anyway, but his family remains grateful to the party to whom they’d given so much.

This bit of horrifying corruption was reported slobberingly by the Dallas Morning News (Baron’s hometown paper), which neatly managed to turn a private company’s obedience to the law into another dragon for Fred Baron to posthumously slay.

Sarah Murnaghan is a 10 year old girl who will die without a lung transplant. The only lung on tap is an adult lung, and HHS guidelines forbid the use of adult lungs on child recipients because of high mortality. Miss Murnaghan’s father is not a Democratic bundler. Miss Murnaghan has never brought down a Fortune 500 company through the use of mass nuisance suits.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refuses to waive the regulation forbidding the transplant, even though Miss Murnaghan’s doctors believe she has a good chance of surviving the transplant (and no chance at all of surviving without it).

This bit of news got its only real play in conservative media.

Today, a 10 year old girl is being sentenced to death because she is not rich and is not a Democratic donor of fantastic proportions.

The stones cry out for reporting on this. Right now, the Washington Post should have reporters all over this story and the easy comparison — and they should be asking if there are other Fred Barons out there. They should be asking if there are other agencies and processes where the wealthy and powerful have been given a free pass, while the weak and poor suffer.

We know that the IRS, at least at a certain level, targeted conservatives, pro-lifers, and Israel backers for extra scrutiny. We know this because the IRS admitted it. Those same allegations, made by conservatives for over a year, were ignored by a media too compliant with the ruling party.

This is what liberal bias is like. It’s not shading, it’s not playing up the Democrats against the Republicans. It is ignoring the stink of corruption from Democrats and government in general, because they can’t be wrong. It is about systemic corruption that goes unreported.

Fred Baron’s free pass came in the lame duck days of George W. Bush, when the apparently-permanent Speaker of the House carried more sway with the permanent bureaucracy than its nominal head. Are we really to believe that this sort of thing hasn’t been repeated? We know about cronyism for Tesla and Solyndra and so many others; is that all? Shouldn’t these be questions a press corps heavily invested in Washington, D.C. is asking?

Because the stories of Fred Baron and Sarah Murnaghan should absolutely thrill a real watchdog press. Those stories tell of massive government dysfunction in drug approval; of corruption; of influence and power; of the power of the strong to work government for their own ends, while the weak are instead crushed by leviathan.

It is the corruption and politicization of every aspect of our health system in one story. It is the powerful beating the people. It is someone’s baby girl dying because he has not given Democrats money, and a 61 year old trial lawyer getting extra chances.

A rich Democrat worked the system and broke the rules to have a chance at life. A not-rich, not-Democrat is publicly told to just die already.

A real press would dedicate whole reporting desks to this. If John McCain or Mitt Romney was President today, HHS would be under constant assault (and rightfully!) for potential cronyism. Yet the national papers with the most investment in covering the Federal Government won’t even look at this.

That is the danger of liberal bias. The press is not the fourth branch of government, despite pretensions to the contrary. But it is vital to a functioning government.

The media — regardless of political preference — should be asking basic questions: Which agencies have done terrible, corrupt, wasteful and despicable things and haven’t admitted it? Which Congressmen have pulled strings for donors and broken the law? If we had a truly free press, these stories would drive coverage — and more importantly, reporting — for a year if not more.

The media were all over Duke Cunningham, and rightfully so. And they briefly covered William Jefferson because IN HIS FREEZER. But the danger isn’t stupid, easily-caught bribes. It is a government that works by breaking its rules for the powerful.

But a press that sees liberals as the good guys, and government as justice personified, can’t see this when their side is the powerful.

Now, this is made worse because media watchdogs are too close to those they cover by class and ideology. But they’re not robots. We’re not Marxists. We know that class and even ideology can be put aside.

Yet they won’t.

Liberal media bias is about small people crushed under a leviathan while the great and the good ride high on its back. It is about small stories that add up to a giant, sickening picture being systematically ignored. It is about the failure of people who think the First Amendment was crafted for their personal use not bothering to exercise it.

Someone’s baby girl will either die because she didn’t give to Democrats; or won’t, because she was the rare one whose father worked the system to shame the powerful.

How many others of the weak will suffer while the powerful who gave to the ruling party prosper? And will we ever hear about it?

Spoilers: We won’t.

[Forever_frost]

It was a big win for the family of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan when a federal judge ruled Wednesday she could be placed on the adult transplant list, as her parents say she only has weeks to live, battling cystic fibrosis while she hopes for a lung transplant.

Thursday, the same judge has ordered that a second child at a Philadelphia hospital — a New York City boy — be put on the adult waiting list for donated lungs too, even though neither he nor Murnaghan technically qualify for the list based on their age.


n this May 30, 2013 photo provided by the Murnaghan family, Sarah Murnaghan, left, lies in her hospital bed next to adopted sister Ella on the 100th day of her stay in Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Hoping to get a lung transplant, the 10-year-old suburban Philadelphia girl has been hospitalized at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for three months with end-stage cystic fibrosis. (Photo: AP/Murnaghan Family)
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson involves 11-year-old Javier Acosta of the Bronx, who also has cystic fibrosis. His mother filed a lawsuit Thursday that says he will die soon unless he gets a lung transplant.

The decision comes a day after a national organ transplant network complied with Baylson’s unusual order to place a Murnaghan on the list. Children under 12 are currently matched with pediatric donors, which are rare, or wait at the end of the adult list.

According to CBS Local out of Philadelphia, the court filing said Acosta’s brother died while waiting for a lung transplant when he was the same age two years ago.

“When a judge steps in and says, ‘I don’t like these rules, I think they’re arbitrary,’ they better be very arbitrary or he’s undermining the authority of the whole system. Why wouldn’t anybody sue?” CBS News reported New York University Langone Medical Center bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan saying.

Medical ethicists question the judge’s intervention. But lawyer Stephen Harvey, who represents both families, feared that Javier and Sarah would die while the issue continued review.

For the last few weeks, Murnaghan’s parents had been fighting for their daughter be put on the waiting list for an adult transplant while she also remained on the pediatric list.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/06/judge-puts-another-child-on-adult-transplant-waiting-list-after-mom-sues/

[Pro88LX]

bump. shes in surgery now:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-pennsylvania-girl-gets-lung-transplant-20130612,0,3127930.story

[talisman]

Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old girl whose family successfully sued to make her more likely to get a pair of adult lungs, may have gotten a boost from public attention before her lung transplant last week, but now that it's over, some of that attention has turned negative.

On Friday, June 14, Sarah's mother, Janet Murnaghan, posted a list of "facts" about lung transplants to her Facebook page, explaining that she'd seen a lot of misinformation "out there" and wanted to clarify a few things.

Murnaghan then said her Facebook page was for supporters only, and she didn't want to be tagged in anything in which people might speak negatively about her in the comments section.

On Sunday night, the "Save Sarah Murnaghan" Facebook page moderator addressed even more negative comments. The Murnaghan family spokeswoman said she did not know who created the page.
"I CANT BELIEVE SOME OF THE NEG COMMENTS," the moderator wrote. "Rude !!! rude !! rude !!!...please don't make neg comments ... this page is to encourage!!"

Federal Judge Michael Baylson drew criticism from the medical and bioethics communities for his June 5 decision to grant a temporary restraining order against Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to prevent her from enforcing the so-called Under 12 Rule for Sarah.

"I think we can all sympathize with the plight of a young girl, but maybe a 13-year-old girl waiting for an adult organ is the one who didn't get a transplant," said Dr. Sander Florman, who directs the Mount Sinai Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute in New York and hasn't treated Sarah. "I think it sets a very dangerous precedent to have a court deciding medical necessities and allocation even if the rules aren't right."
Read about who's worried about Sarah's ruling.

Some commenters on ABCNews.com called for Sebelius to be "tarred and feathered" for initially refusing to make an exception for Sarah, while others passionately argued that Sarah's new lungs would have better served an adult.

Join the conversation in our comments section! Do you think Sarah should have gotten a lung transplant from an adult donor?

The ruling -- and eventual transplant -- also prompted editorials in the Philly Post of Philadelphia Magazine, the Chicago Tribune and others in which writers argued that they hoped Sarah's court battle wouldn't encourage others to seek legal action to trump medical guidelines. The Philadelphia Magazine editorial was titled "Maybe Sarah Murnaghan Shouldn't Get a Lung Transplant."

Sarah's June 12 lung transplant from an adult donor was the 11th of its kind since 1987. The last transplant from a donor older than 18 to a child younger than 12 took place a few months ago, according to an OPTN spokeswoman. The one before that happened in 2006, when the Under 12 Rule was new.

Murnaghan updated her Facebook page to say that Sarah's recovery was difficult but she was slowly improving. Sarah was still "fully sedated and critical" Sunday night but made positive "baby steps" by Monday morning.

As Murnaghan addressed negative commenters on Facebook Friday night, she wrote that the Organ Transplantation and Procurement Network ultimately "agreed" with her family "and has changed their policy for ALL kids so that children like Sarah can get on the over-12 list if their doctors deem it appropriate medically."

OPTN actually voted to keep the Under 12 Rule but added a part that allows for occasional exceptions. These children have to be recommended by their doctors and then have their cases reviewed by a national board before they can actually be exempted from the Under 12 Rule.

Here's how the Under 12 Rule -- which is more like a series of rules -- actually works.

Lung transplant candidates older than 12 are assigned a lung allocation score, or LAS, based on a complex mathematical formula that includes the patient's age and size. For transplant patients younger than 12 -- of which there are 20 nationally compared with about 1,600 adults -- the LAS is not used. Instead, patients are broken into "priority 1" and "priority 2." It's this difference that has been called discriminatory in court.

"If you are under 12 it is the amount of time you have waited that matters," Murnaghan wrote in her clarification post. "So if you are dying and have been on the list one hour you will NOT get the lungs."

This is not 100 percent true. Although time on the list is considered, an OPTN spokeswoman told ABCNews.com that it's not the only thing that matters. Instead, lungs are allocated to the 20 children under 12 on the list by medical urgency, blood type and time on the list.

Children get priority for lungs donated from children younger than 12, but they have to wait for children between 12 and 17 to decline lungs donated from 12- to 17-year-olds before they get a chance at them. Lungs donated by anyone older than 18 are offered to all candidates older than 12, depending on their LAS. Only if all local matching candidates 12 and older decline the adult lungs can they be offered to children within 500 miles of the hospital where the lungs were harvested.

[Sean88gt]

I can assure you, parents will do some crazy shit as this gains steam. Honestly, if we were going to go the route of socialized health care (instead of gov't run insurance), we probably should have looked to the European section. If anyone knows how to run socialism successfully - IT ISN'T US.

[BP]

She ended up having two transplant procedures after developing pneumonia with the first set. She might end up going home this week though, hopefully it all works out.

http://keranews.org/post/little-girl-who-needed-lung-transplants-due-go-home

[8mpg]

This is really interesting to see you guys' point of view on the situation. The fact she is a child makes this more emotional.

Top of the list isnt really "top of the list". You become a different classification (1A) where you are on a vent or needing life sustaining help in a hospital. Like the article said, there were 40 others that needed lungs. What puts this little girl ahead of others? What if there is a 9 year old that is bigger than her that needed lungs? You have to make rules and stick with them to be fair to everyone. Making one person better than another is not okay in my mind.

There are many different things that go into matching candidates including illness, infections, geographic location, etc. I believe heart/lungs must be within a 4 hour area. The reason people like Steve Jobs was so quick to get a transplant was because he could jump on a jet and be anywhere in the US in 4 hours. There is a fine line where people are sick enough to be status 1A and too sick for a transplant. Lets all hope this little girl didnt end up robbing 2 other people of life saving organs just because an emotional public and judge broke the rules. This sounds horrible but it is what it is.

BP - You are very lucky with your brother getting lungs that fast. I see many people wait a long long time for heart/lung transplants and some who dont get them in time.

[JC316]

This is really interesting to see you guys' point of view on the situation. The fact she is a child makes this more emotional.

Top of the list isnt really "top of the list". You become a different classification (1A) where you are on a vent or needing life sustaining help in a hospital. Like the article said, there were 40 others that needed lungs. What puts this little girl ahead of others? What if there is a 9 year old that is bigger than her that needed lungs? You have to make rules and stick with them to be fair to everyone. Making one person better than another is not okay in my mind.

There are many different things that go into matching candidates including illness, infections, geographic location, etc. I believe heart/lungs must be within a 4 hour area. The reason people like Steve Jobs was so quick to get a transplant was because he could jump on a jet and be anywhere in the US in 4 hours. There is a fine line where people are sick enough to be status 1A and too sick for a transplant. Lets all hope this little girl didnt end up robbing 2 other people of life saving organs just because an emotional public and judge broke the rules. This sounds horrible but it is what it is.

BP - You are very lucky with your brother getting lungs that fast. I see many people wait a long long time for heart/lung transplants and some who dont get them in time.

Steve Jobs didn't get a transplant cause he could be on a plane, he got it because he was obscenely rich and famous. Same as the celebrities and sports players that get probation for breaking just about any law. If the rules were actually the rules for everyone, then I would agree, but they get broken all the damned time for certain people. If the president and a normal person both need a set of lungs, guess who is going to get them.

[8mpg]

Steve Jobs didn't get a transplant cause he could be on a plane, he got it because he was obscenely rich and famous. Same as the celebrities and sports players that get probation for breaking just about any law. If the rules were actually the rules for everyone, then I would agree, but they get broken all the damned time for certain people. If the president and a normal person both need a set of lungs, guess who is going to get them.

I have confidence in saying you are wrong. Steve Jobs had the money and the ability to travel thus putting him on multiple lists across the US was possible. If he depended on health insurance to cover workups he could only jump on a hospital list every 6 months.

[BP]

Steve Jobs didn't get a transplant cause he could be on a plane, he got it because he was obscenely rich and famous. Same as the celebrities and sports players that get probation for breaking just about any law. If the rules were actually the rules for everyone, then I would agree, but they get broken all the damned time for certain people. If the president and a normal person both need a set of lungs, guess who is going to get them.

Walter Payton would have liked to known about this. Now if someone were ridiculously wealthy like Jobs they could visit somewhere like say China and arrange to have someone executed and take their organs. It's not exactly moral but the communists don't really care.

Now when you are talking about living donors there is some truth to what you are saying. If someone like Bill Gates needed a kidney he'd probably have a list of willing donors while someone off the street would need to rely on family/friends or wait for one from the list.