Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told the radio station WABC on Sunday he may not have been granted his recent emergency quadruple bypass heart surgery if he was insured under Obamacare, BuzzFeed reported.
“You are talking to someone right now who probably wouldn’t be here if we had socialized medicine in America,” he said on host Aaron Klein’s radio show, referring to Obamacare.
Inhofe, 79, told Klein he discovered he needed immediate heart surgery for clogged arteries after going in for a routine colonoscopy, and that had he been in a country with “socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” the operation might have been unavailable.
“A person can find out, here in the United States, 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 United States, 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,” he said.
“And so the message there is, you know I say this to all of your American listeners, let’s hold onto what we’ve got here,” he said. “You know, you are talking to someone right now who probably wouldn’t be here if we had socialized medicine in America.”
