A Republican senator said over the weekend that he believed President Barack Obama’s health care reform law would have left him dead instead of providing the recent emergency quadruple bypass heart surgery that saved his life.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told WABC radio’s Aaron Klein that he went in to see his doctor for a routine colonoscopy and discovered that his arteries were so blocked that he was “just about to die.”

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The Oklahoma Republican explained that he wasn’t even sure if he would make it to the operating table.

“You know, a person can find out here in the United States that he has this emergency situation where he’s got to have immediate heart surgery, and if you’re in a country other than the United States — a lot of them — you can’t get it done,” Inhofe said. “In my case with my age, it would have been about a six month wait because I hadn’t had a heart attack.”

“And so, the message there is — and I say this to all of our American listeners — let’s hold on to what we’ve got here,” he continued. “You’re talking to someone right now who probably wouldn’t be here if we had socialized medicine in America.”

As a 78-year-old American, Inhofe is eligible for the socialized government insurance program known as Medicare.

Watch the video below from WABC, recorded Oct. 20, 2013.

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[Photo: Jim Inhofe by Gage Skidmore]

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(h/t: Buzzfeed via Talking Point Memo)