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

So liberals want to start using Senator Kennedy as the poster child for health care. Well, nothing like a good pictorial meme to replicate like a virus and stick in peoples mind. Still, I only have two of these, so if you have more, send them along and let’s start a collection.

In other news and opinion:

Team Obama denies politicizing homeland security. Insert laugh track.

Culture of corruption: Rangel edition

Liberal Paranoia and the Kopechne Effect

Betsy Markey Tells The Truth In Front Of Large Astroturf Audience

Huffington Post on Mary Jo Kopechne’s Death: “Who Knows– Maybe She’d Feel It Was Worth It”. Sick.

“One of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself”; Update: Audio added

Congressional Research Service: ObamaCare will cover illegal immigrants

Spreading the Health (Care) Around

I remember it well.

President Clinton, John Kerry, China, Russia, the UK, and a slew of others all admitted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Then came the Iraq war.

When no WMDs were found, the liberals conveniently forgot their own worshiped icons, including the UN, were on the record agreeing Saddam did have these weapons. No, it was Bush that lied.

Then came the predictable protest signs: Bush Lied, People Died.

It was the liberals who were lying.

Now many of those same liberals want to use Senator Kennedy’s passing to bludgeon through an unpopular health care bill. To do this requires the cooperation of the press to whitewash the real Kennedy legacy, rename the legislative effort to something which instantiates the memory of the Senator and shove it down our throats. So the media will lie, or conveniently forget the facts, and liberals in Congress will continue their all-out assault on the truth. But nothing in the current or planned legislation will have changed, and all the lies of the left are still present and accounted for.

Therefore, I say it is appropriate at this time for those opposed to liberal liberty stealing solutions to health care to state loudly that Kennedy Died, Liberals Lied. More realistically would be Kennedy Died, Liberals Lied, People Died, but the former shares more in common with the disingenuous messaging from the left concerning Bush.

If a public run option (read government controlled healthcare) is included in the final bill – even in the form of cooperatives which are nothing more than a RHINO creation and a Trojan horse for public healthcare – then all the lies of the liberals still exist. Renaming the bill or invoking the name of the Senator does not magically change the facts. A public option in the end will crowd out private insurers as nobody can compete with the government. What will be left is government controlled heathcare, and nothing can screw things up quite as well as anything government controlled. The current legislation and narrative from the left contains the following lies:

• A public plan won’t be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly
• You can keep you current doctor
• You can keep your insurance
• Rationing will not occur. Want a chill to run up and down your spine? Read this expose from the Wall Street Journal: Obama’s Health Rationer-in-Chief. Still feeling safe?
• Nobody will be compelled to buy coverage
• Government can control health care costs better than the private sector
• A public option is a must to compete with private insurance and control costs
• Allowing for competition only among private insurers will not drive down the cost
• This overhaul won’t cost a penny – it will be deficit neutral. Just like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all shining examples of government run programs and their efficiencies. We will actually save money. Ahem, by rationing. Shhhh, keep that last one a secret

I rest my case.

In other news and opinion:

From the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (love the picture emperor – hope you won’t behead me for using it here, but this is a visual meme that could very well end the push to use Kennedy as an icon to push through this vile piece of legislation: As Night Follows Day. Now for the picture of the year:

Blair Holt Bill Will Prohibit Ownership Of Handguns By Those Who Have Not Obtained A Firearm License

Obama’s Top Five Health Care Lies

Byrd Wants To Rename Healthcare Bill After Teddy. Say Hello To TeddyCare. So Cute And Cuddly You Just Got To Have It

Meet Obama’s newest Census collectors: Your kids!

Culture of corruption: Bill Richardson edition

Kennedy’s Legacy Is In Obama’s Hands

Pelosi: Ted Kennedy Died? Great! That Ought to Help Us Pass Health Care!

The Obama Clergy Call

More evidence that Nancy Pelosi lied and that the Obamaites are living in a bubble

Code Red: DC Open for Business. America needs a warning system to identify the threats coming out of Washington. (h/t Glenn Reynolds)

No trillion-dollar healthcare tribute for Kennedy

Ted Kennedy, Political Abstraction

Can anyone match Kennedy’s clout?. The whitewashing worship service will continue and be on display for the next month or two. Thank you for attending.

Does Ted Kennedy’s Death Breathe New Life into the Health Care Debate?

The Hill is reporting that Senator Byrd wants health bill renamed for Kennedy. Wow, that was fast. I have to ask myself if liberals were primed and pumped for the passing of the lion.

Calling it TeddyCare would be disingenuous. The difference between the type of care he received vs. what we will receive under any of the bills in the House or Senate are world’s apart. Putting lipstick on a pig does not make it pretty and a pile of crap by any other name is still a pile of crap.

Videos: Chris Matthews, not politicizing Kennedy’s death

The wretched excess begins

More from Politico.

Honor Kennedy By Doing What He Did, Not What He Said

No trillion-dollar healthcare tribute for Kennedy. (h/t Mr. Reynolds)

Kennedy’s seat may remain empty for months

Kennedy Care? How’d That Work Out For Mary Jo?

Dems’ new rallying cry: Let’s pass this trillion-dollar travesty for Teddy

Irresponsible rumor of the day: Panetta resigning as CIA chief?

Does Ted Kennedy’s Death Breathe New Life into the Health Care Debate?