Update: Rush Limbaugh just admitted he was wrong about stating the Republicans should not attend the summit. Republicans are knocking Obama around like a lightweight.

Watching the sob stories from the Dems in Kabuki theater is making me sick.

I come from Canada – single payer. My wife was born in Britain – public option. So a Canadian premier comes to US for heart surgery to repair a valve. In Canada he would have required a full on cracking on the sternum, in the U.S. they came in through his armpit. In Britain, a breast cancer saving drug was denied to millions on the public plan by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) – a real cruel acronym if ever one existed.

A drug which can give women with advanced breast cancer extra weeks or months of life has been turned down by a government watchdog body for use in the NHS.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) says it proposes to reject Tyverb (lapatinib) in spite of changes in the rules brought in specifically to allow people at the end of their lives to have the chance of new and often expensive treatments.

Tyverb is the only drug licensed for women with advanced breast cancer whose tumours test positive for a protein called HER2 and for whom Herceptin, a Nice-approved drug, is no longer working. In much of the rest of Europe, Tyverb is then given, in combination with a standard chemotherapy drug called capecitabine.

Herceptin was denied until the NHS was sued.

Let’s see – Kennedy had brain cancer and he went to…hmmm….Britain? No. Germany? No. Canada? No. Mexico? No. China? No. Oh, that’s right – he stayed here in America. I wonder why?

And Bill Clinton loves American health care too:

With President Obama hoping this week’s “bipartisan summit” will move his health-care bill out of the ICU, it’s worth taking a look at a recent high-profile operation — the heart work done on former President Bill Clinton.

Clinton, of course, got the best of care — a cardiac stent (a tiny metal cylinder) coated with a drug to help keep his artery open. Recent studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere have shown that these drug-eluting stents are more effective than bare metal ones.

But they cost two-to-four times more — and the technology is relatively new. That combination has left government-run health-care systems slow to adopt them. The disparity between the US and Canada is striking.

Per capita, our neighbors to the north receive only half as many coronary interventions. And only 30 percent of the stents placed in Canada are drug eluting, compared with a whopping 80 percent in the United States.

So a Canadian cardiac patient is less than a quarter as likely as an American to be outfitted with the kind of state-of-the-art stent that Clinton had.

In Canada, land of single-payer health insurance, you’re also less likely to get the stent as soon as the need is clear — especially in western provinces where resources are extremely limited and access is spotty. In Edmonton, Alberta, the wait for a cardiac procedure is routinely three to four months. In many areas of western Canada, less than half of angioplasties and stents are done at the same time as the original angiogram, a big waste of time and resources.

Canada has been attempting to deal with this problem of excess delay and inefficiency by introducing a database-driven system that assigns scores based on urgency. But many American cardiologists shudder at exactly this kind of solution — a federal system for deciding who needs an urgent procedure and who doesn’t. And if you were to think that rationing cardiac care is a way of saving money, you’d be dead wrong. An Austrian study just published found that the cost of waiting dramatically increases the average cost of treatment per patient.

The record of the last half-century is unmistakable: Government-dominated health sectors don’t innovate as fast, and they resist the latest discoveries because they “see” the costs up-front, and are slow to accept the benefits.

Any of the ObamaCare bills would push us in Canada’s direction, with policymakers looking hard to find overly simplistic solutions to justify lower costs for cheaper technologies. Indeed, some US “experts” are already brandishing a single 2008 study, known as the COURAGE trial, that seems to undermine the value of stents.

But ask any of the one million US patients who have received a stent over the last year if they think the capital investment that companies have made on evolving stent technology has been worth it. Perhaps even the former president would agree to the cost/benefit of stenting, even as he’s championing a form of health care that could take that routine option away.

I got sob stories for you. If ObamaCare passes, I will have millions of them. A lot more than the dems are regurgitating now.

Related:

More Vote Scoring of the GOP At Healthcare Summit

The House Goes First or ObamaCare Dies

Watch out Republicans: Obama Readies a Fallback Health-Care Proposal. Read more here.

GOP, do NOT agree to anything from this manipulative trickster. Hold your ground and review anything thoroughly. If you stick it to us on this, you will pay a dear price. They have LOST. Do not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Blowhard-a-thon at Blair House: Health care summit open thread

The mantra of the day: There were no attacks under George Bush after 9/11. Learn it, love it, live it.

For all his faults, George Bush did protect the homeland.

For all his faults, Obama continues to multiply the number of his faults. I quit counting.

As Obama continues to quickly move to a 9/10 mentality that President Clinton would be proud of, the President’s approval of Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation of the CIA, combined with other political moves designed to weaken our national security and the ability of our intelligence community to gather information and protect this country, is a dereliction of duty of the highest order. Should any future attack on this country occur, there will be blood on the hands of not only Obama and Eric Holder, but any liberal in Congress who does not step up now and declare their own contempt for any action that strengthens our enemies while weakening this country thereby putting all of us at greater risk.

A resolution should immediately be put forward in the House and Senate condemning Eric Holder and the CIA investigation. Let there be a full accounting within Congress of those who stand for and against the safety of this country. That way, we can remember in 2010 and 2012 who is on the side of our enemies and who is on the side of America. And let this resolution be brought to the floor of both Chambers every single day until election day in 2010, and every single day after that until 2012. High Treason is at hand, and let it be recognized for what it is, for what Eric Holder and Obama are doing is providing aid and comfort to our enemies by pulling out the rug from under the CIA and all but muting their ability to protect us all. And make no mistake, the damage is already done and Attorney General Eric Holder should immediately be fired. Should we be attacked again, don’t look for American’s to rally around a President directly responsible for enabling the enemies of our country. Look for America to hold Obama accountable, for this is within his control to stop.

Obama is not Harry Houdini, and the American people are actually smarter than most of the liberals in Congress, as recently evidenced by the fact that many of us actually read HR3200. Try as he might, escaping the obvious is impossible not only for Obama, but for many Democrats in Congress to dense to realize that chaining themselves to the leftists of their party is actually not in their best political interests.

Jennifer Rubin writes in Commentary Magazine The Commander in Chief Hides, but nobody is fooled, for the attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president:

The president has been playing the “Look, Ma—no hands!” game for the better part of a week, denying responsibility for the decision to name a special prosecutor to go after CIA operatives interrogating terrorists overseas. Democrats are ignoring the whole thing, now dimly aware that this is not the sort of thing the public likes. Conservatives are furious and taking the president to task for his refusal to take responsibility for the decision—or fire Attorney General Eric Holder if this isn’t what the president wanted.

Michael Barone, recalling that Harry Truman sacked an attorney general, writes:

Obama administration spokesmen are portraying the president as unable to overrule Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to have a special prosecutor determine whether to prosecute CIA interrogators who were cleared by Department of Justice career attorneys back in 2004. “This was not something the White House allowed, this was something the AG decided,” a White House spokesman said. Utter nonsense. The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, and the president can determine that a prosecution would undermine the national security—a subject on which he has a wider perspective and a greater responsibility than the attorney general—and order that it not go forward.

[. . .]

If Barack Obama really meant it when he said that he didn’t want to see prosecutions of CIA interrogators for acts committed long ago, for which they were cleared long ago, he has a ready alternative: he can give Eric Holder the same treatment Harry Truman gave [his attorney general] J. Howard McGrath.

Newt Gingrich makes a similar suggestion. And Rep. Pete Hoekstra, ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, is outraged that Holder is conducting his own war on CIA personnel—over the strenuous and entirely ignored objections of Leon Panetta. We are left wondering why the president prefers to hide, copping to managerial ineptness and timidity. This is no way to score points with the netroots and liberals on the Hill. They are expecting a robust series of investigations and prosecutions and can’t be impressed with the president’s timidity. (And he will come off the Martha Vineyard’s golf course eventually and face some questions about all this.)

So if Obama does not support the actions of AG Eric Holder, then its time for Mr. Holder to hear the words popularized by Donald Trump…”You’re fired”. Should Obama wish to pander to the left wing of his base then he will hear those very words himself in 2012, although in my opinion he already is beyond the point of redemption and each of us will be treated to his skulking out the back door of the White House in 2013.

Obama can also signal his intent to use the power of the Presidential Pardon for any convictions that result from the investigation. The problem with this approach is that it will be too late to reverse the serious damage to our national security by politically motivated assaults on its very infrastructure. And it would be weak – good luck finding twelve jurors to convict on the ground of the interrogations themselves. Sure, you may get a perjury conviction – maybe. So the entire show is obviously a political circus that puts everyone at risk. Play politics with my life and the life of those I love and you will have one very, very motivated voter. Sure you want to do that?

In a nutshell:

• The House and Senate should pass a resolution condemning the witch hunt Eric Holder is conducting. This resolution should be brought to the floor every day until the 2010 elections and, if necessary, everyday after that until the 2012 elections. Legislators serious about national security should immediately seek other solutions to put an end to this madness before our intelligence community is irreparably damaged.
• Obama should fire Attorney General Eric Holder. If he does not, then he is explicitly, not implicitly, allowing the investigation to continue as it is within his power to put an end to this.
• Unless Obama reverses direction on this and any other policies which continue to weaken our security then he is personally responsible for any attack within our borders or against American citizens abroad that could have been avoided with the policies in place under George W. Bush made now defunct under Obama.

In the days ahead, we will know who is for protecting American families and who is against it. Those against security will pay for their misplaced loyalties.

In other news and opinion:

Goodbye War In Afghanistan?. Go ahead Obama, piss on graves of over three thousand dead men, women, an children. Remember. Remember. Remember.

I saw this one coming: Republican Promises To Reverse Obamacare If GOP Wins In 2012. Encouraging to hear, but trust me, no guarantee. Keep the pressure up – I would rather see ObamaCare die this year. Trust me, it can be done.

Wackjob science czar to appear on David Letterman

Tom Ridge: Straight to the remainder bin

Monday morning quick hits: Gadhafi, Haditha, Dingy Harry & more

Ridge: Sorry, Just Trying To Sell My Book. Pinhead.

The Kennedy Watch

WaPo Asks: Is That a Recovery in Your Pants?. Using underwear as an economic barometer. Now I have seen and heard everything. I can just hear it now: “Wall street saw a sharp decline today after the release of the latest Tighty Whitey Index indicated men are going commando in a sure sign the economy is in big trouble.”

Cheney Wins. Of course he does. Never bet against a real man and a real American.

Harry Reid cheers unemployment in Las Vegas media!

Gibbs accuses Bush/Cheney of “underresourcing” the whitewashed war on terror