Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
On Sunday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that if Obamacare had been fully in place this year, he probably would have died of a heart attack. That’s not true.
After going in for a routine colonoscopy a few weeks ago, Inhofe’s doctors found that his arteries were dangerously clogged, so they immediately took him to the ER, the 79-year-old senator told Aaron Klein on his WABC radio show Sunday. He suggested that if he had been living a part of the world with “socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” he never would have gotten the life-saving surgery: “A person can find out, here in the US, that he has this emergency situation where he has got to have immediate heart surgery. And if you are in a country other than the US, a lot of them, you can’t get it done. In my case, with my age, that would have been about a six-month wait. Because I hadn’t had a heart attack,” Inhofe said.
“It’s preposterous and couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Ethan Rome, executive director of Healthcare for America now, a non-profit that backs Obamacare. “When people in authority say such ridiculous things,” he adds, “It’s a dangerous thing because people will take him seriously.” Here’s what the senator got wrong:
1. Obamacare is not socialized medicine. “Obamacare bears no resemblance to Canadian-style socialized medicine,” says Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped craft the massive health care law. Obamacare expands private health insurance coverage for most people, and in states that are allowing it, the law also expands one of our existing public health programs, Medicaid.
Excerpt from:
