Former vice-president Dick Cheney was recuperating in northern Virginia after successfully undergoing a heart transplant operation over the weekend.
Interestingly, as arguments both for and against 0bamacare went before the Supreme Court, pundits and various media outlets questioned whether or not Cheney should've even undergone the procedure to begin with.
Some medical centers will not perform a heart transplant on patient over 65, but other major centers will perform transplants on patients who are as old as 72.Cheney had been waiting for 20 months for the new heart, longer than the national average.
In any case, transplants at Cheney's age are not unheard of: Last year 332 heart transplants were performed on people over 65, and according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, 14 percent of recepients are over the age of 65.
"Patients from 18 all the way up to 71 years old, are on the same national list and you're listed on the basis of medical urgency and then how long you've been waiting," said Dr. Jonathan Chen, an adjunct associate professor of surgery at Columbia University in New York.
Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem that long ago that the notion of death panels were dismissed as a myth or politically driven hoax. Yet here we are, not quite three years later with the media and others seemingly wistful at the prospect of Cheney having to go before some sort of government panel that would arbitrarily decide whether or not he could recieve any kind of lifesaving treatment.
Cheney's only five or six years older than former President Bill Clinton, who had already undergone cardiac surgery in 2010. I'm curious to know if a 71 year old William Jefferson Clinton required a heart transplant, would we be hearing speculation from the media over whether or not Clinton was too old?
