Rep. Akin Lies: At 62, I Couldn't Get A Hip Replacement In Canada
Speaking on the House floor, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) repeated a claim debunked by his hometown newspaper over two months ago.
Earlier this summer, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said that, at 59, he wouldn't be able to get hip replacement surgery in Canada or Great Britain because he's too old. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch swiftly proved the claim was false, while the nonpartisan PolitiFact.com awarded Blunt its infamous "Pants on Fire" rating, indicating that his charge was blatantly untrue. Blunt consequently vowed to stop repeating the falsehood.
However, another conservative from the "Show-Me" state, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), made no such promise. On the House floor today, Akin, who is 62 years old, claimed that he couldn't get a hip replacement in Canada because of his age:
AKIN: I just hit 62, and I was just reading that in Canada [if] I got a bad hip I wouldn't be able to get that hip replacement that [Rep. Dan Lungren] got, because I'm too old! I'm an old geezer now and it's not worth a government bureaucrat to pay me to get my hip fixed.
Watch it:
Akin either doesn't read his hometown newspaper (his district includes suburbs north and west of St. Louis) or he's lying. As the Post-Dispatch wrote in response to Blunt, "At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year...were on patients age 65 or older." In 2006-2007, an additional 1,577 hip replacement surgeries were performed in Canada on patients over 85.
Finally, it should be noted that this line of argument, intended to disparage the Canadian system, is irrelevant. President Obama is not proposing a Canadian-style, single-payer plan. But, if he were, Akin could take comfort in the fact that his hip would be just fine.
