GOP committee chair opens hearing by suggesting Planned Parenthood funding helped kill his parents

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) suggested on Monday that both of his parents might be alive if the government had used Planned Parenthood funding for cancer research.

At a hearing inspired by anti-Planned Parenthood videos, Chaffetz opened by choking up as he explained that both of his parents had died from cancer.

"Cancer in this country kills about 1,500 people a day -- a day," the chairman noted. "And yet, our federal government only spends $5 billion to fight it. If they were shooting 1,500 people a day, if there were rockets coming in, we would be fighting this with everything we've got."

"We don't spend enough on cancer," he continued. "And the reason I'm passionate about the hearing today is we've got a lot of health care providers who in their hearts know they are trying to provide good."

"But the question before us is does this organization, does Planned Parenthood really need federal subsidy? Does it need federal dollars? Every time we spend a federal dollar, what we're doing is we're pulling money out of somebody's pocket and we're giving it to somebody else."

Chaffetz worried that people were becoming numb to "wasting these taxpayer dollars."

"And as best I can tell -- we're going to have a hearing here -- this is an organization that doesn't need federal subsidy."

Watch the video below from C-SPAN, broadcast Sept. 29, 2015.