No, Sen. Inhofe, Obamacare Would Not Have Killed You

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8528/8495399354_db27d81bc9_o.jpg">Flickr</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


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.

2. There’s no rationing of health care under Obamacare. There are provisions throughout the Affordable Care Act that prohibit restrictions on care. The law controls costs by requiring insurers to devote a certain percentage of premiums to health care costs instead of profits, for example, not by restricting the level of care Americans receive. And the fact that more Americans will enroll for coverage will not mean longer wait times for care, says Timothy Jost, a health law scholar at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. Some people who were previously uninsured may initially find it harder to find a primary care provider. But Jost says Obamacare won’t stand in the way of treatment if you’re about to have a heart attack. “Under the Affordable Care Act, you get to see the doctor of your choice and get the care that you need when you need it,” says Rome. “The experience [Inhofe] had is an experience that more people will have because of the law.”

3. By the way, “socialized medicine” in most other industrialized countries works just fine. “I’d be interested to know what countries [Inhofe is] talking about,” says Jost, referring to the senator’s comment about countries with socialized medicine that would make him wait six months for bypass surgery. “I’ve lived in a lot of countries with public health care systems,” he says. “They do a really good job with emergency care.” Jost says most developed countries with socialized health care systems would be “perfectly capable” of dealing with clogged arteries. Even poorer countries with smaller budgets for their public health care systems usually have longer wait times for elective procedures, but not for emergency situations, he adds.

4. Obamacare is already the law. Inhofe implied that he was saved from a heart attack because Obamacare was not yet in place. “In case he missed it, we are three and a half years into the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,” Rome says. Even though the main component of the law—the requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance—goes into effect in 2014, many other provisions of the law are already in effect. Six months after Obama signed the law, for example, insurers could no longer deny family insurance to children with pre-existing conditions. The part of the law that forces insurers to spend a majority of premium dollars on medical care went into effect in 2011.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate