Recovering from a recent quadruple bypass, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe explained thathe would not have survived if he had been in a country with "socialized medicine like Obama is trying to impose upon America,” because insurance kills people. The 79-year-old senator is apparently unaware that millions of people his age are using government-run healthcare systems called Medicare and the Veterans Administration; doctors have so far withheld that information as he is still recovering from heart surgery.

During a routine colonoscopy, because apparently his heart is up his ass, doctors discovered that Inhofe's arteries were dangerously blocked, and advised that he have immediate open-heart surgery.

In an interview yesterday, Inhofe said

“A person can find out, here in the U.S., 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 U.S., 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...

“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. You are talking to someone right now who probably wouldn’t be here if we had socialized medicine in America.”

Mr. Inhofe is apparently unaware that emergency surgery is also available in countries with socialized medicine. We were going to look up survival rates for coronary artery disease in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, but we decided not to bother because this is a man who thinks that snow in the winter proves there's no such thing as global warming.

Senator Inhofe was apparently not asked about the health outlook for people who never get routine checkups because they have no insurance at all.

[Buzzfeed / NewsOK]