PHILADELPHIA — The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services said she won’t intervene in an “incredibly agonizing” transplant decision about a dying Pennsylvania girl, noting that three other children in the same hospital are just as sick.
Kathleen Sebelius told a Congressional panel Tuesday that medical experts should make those decisions.
But relatives of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan said Sebelius’s remarks confused them because they want a policy change for all preadolescent children awaiting lung transplants, not just Murnaghan.
The Newtown Square girl has been hospitalized at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for three months with end-stage cystic fibrosis and is on a ventilator. Her family wants children under 12 to be eligible for adult lungs because so few pediatric lungs are available.
“I’m begging you. … She has three to five weeks to live. Please suspend the rules,” Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., urged Sebelius at a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on her department’s budget.
