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

A friend of mine, in a demonstration of an apoplectic fit bordering on near insanity, spent his morning worrying about a process in the Senate the would only require 51 votes to pass health care reform, bypassing the minority tool to block legislation known as a filibuster. “All hope is lost!” my friend screamed, and the subsequent tirade of expletives aimed at liberals and Obama truly a treasure to experience. Ready to throw in the towel, turn of the computer, and hang up the phone, his look of desperation and despair moved me into immediate action. Fear not, my friend! Spread the word! In an effort to lock out the annoying public from harassing their elected representatives, look for the bullying tactic of threatening the reconciliation process in the Senate to be used and reported on by the mainstream media in an effort to silence your voice.

But here is a little know secret that should be passed on to everyone you know: the reconciliation option is not all it is cut out to be. Check Wikipedia for the gory details. Personally, I recommend not wasting your time, as Mort Kondrake explains why the reconciliation option is essentially off the table and why you won’t find liberal Democrats panting in anticipation as they ponder its use. From Mr. Kondrake:

Liberal health-reform advocates have talked about ramming a reform plan – including a Medicare-like public insurance option – through the Senate with only 51 Democratic votes.

But a leading Senate player says it won’t work.

If an attempt is made to pass health reform under “reconciliation” rules – requiring just a simple majority vote – Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., told me the bill would be so pared down “you’d be left with Swiss cheese.”

Conrad also serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which will mark up its version of health-care reform this month.

Reconciliation rules, he said, require that a bill be scored as deficit-reducing over six years and that any substantive policy change in it also have a fiscal purpose.

The result, said Conrad, is that “you’d be left with a dramatically reduced package” that would fall short of comprehensive health reform.

“You would have a very hard time expanding coverage to the 46 million who don’t have it,” he said, and the “Byrd Rule” – requiring fiscal germaneness – could strip the bill of many of its policy provisions.

So, Conrad said, “health reform needs to be passed on a 60-vote basis, and that means it needs to be bipartisan.”

And that, he said, all but certainly rules out including a government-run “public plan” like Medicare designed to “compete with” – or replace – private insurance companies.

Read the whole article and once empowered against the coming onslaught of threats from the liberal left about this non-option, pick up that phone, turn on that computer, open that email and give it to them good.

Keep up with Michelle on stopping the cap-and-tax bill. If you can’t find enough information in her post, you are not looking closely enough. Here are some highlights:

• The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee begins hearings Tuesday, July 7th.
• Link to Heritage research analysis.
• Pork, pork, and more pork.
• Senators to target.
• Contact information for Senator McCain, a known environut with a propensity to ignore inconvenient facts.
• More Senate analysis of cap-and-trade targets from Temple of Mut.
• A Senate cap-and-trade vote analysis from Nate Silver

Read Megan Mcardle article – Political Constraints on Programs.

More health reform news from Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air. If you recall the song “The Trees” by Rush, the Maples are unhappy in their shade, dwarfed by the giant Oaks. The song ends with the line, “..and the trees are all kept equal with hatchet, axe, and saw”.

The Democrat’s plan to fund health care reform is to tax success. Mediocrity for everyone! Of course, don’t count on any liberal actually using a brain cell or two to figure out that most rich people, defined as those making over $250,000/year are small business owners. Or maybe they do know? I mean, socialism by design is the hatchet, axe and saw of exceptionalism. Misery loves company and, let’s face it, losers are miserable. The slackers, dope smokers, and brainless video game robots want everything for free, as long as you pay for it and they don’t.

For those of you half-wits who believe this is a good idea, ask yourself this: Is your job safe? It just might be you handed that pink slip by those evil profiteers. Good luck out there if you voted for Obama because chances are you are working for the man and may not be gainfully employed much longer. Nutjobs.