How Is Obamacare Turning Us Into Nazi North Korea Today?

Gosh, remember when former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary to some Tea Party loon named David Brat, and we laughed and laughed and looked forward to all the crazy stupid stuff Brat would do in Congress? Except how Brat was just kind of garden variety dumb, and not generally all that funny? Oh, sure, there was the time he said we don't need to worry about education funding none, because Socrates just taught on a rock with a stick, and that was funny, but only rated about 450 MilliGohmerts.

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Well thank goodness, Cantor's idiot replacement has finally come along with a variation on standard Tea Party Stupid that manages to actually impress us with the depth and breadth of its sheer idiocy. You see, not only does he share the delusion that the Affordable Care Act is a "government takeover" of health care -- never mind that it's all run through for-profit insurance companies -- but he also has Thoughts about how Obamacare is turning America into North Korea. That's more like it, Davey! We knew you had some genuine Teahadi Stupid in you, scoring a respectable 880 MilliGohmerts, which is a pretty good bit of stupid for a brand new Congresscritter.

Here's how Davey Brat did it: At some stupid conference called "Hold Their Feet To The Fire” -- we guess it has something to do with branding and foot fetishes, we dunno -- Brat took issue with a PolitiFact post that said he'd been wrong when he recently claimed that repealing Obamacare would save the government over $2 trillion. Well, nobody calls David Brat wrong! In fact, by requiring millions of Americans to buy private insurance from their choice of several plans offered in a, whatchacall, marketplace, the ACA is insidiously destroying the free market!

Said Brat to interlocutor Lars Larson (we guess Erick Erickson was out that day), all you need to do is look around at other countries to see that America is ditching the free market, and freedom with it!

“Look at every country in the world,” Brat said. “Look at North Korea and South Korea. It’s the same culture, it’s the same people, look at a map at night, half the, one of the countries is not lit, there’s no lights, and the bottom free-market country, all Koreans, is lit up. See you make your bet on which country you want to be, right? You want to go free market.”

So obviously, Obamacare is going to make the lights go out, instead of making us a shining Korea on a peninsula!

We really hate to suggest that Mr. Brat might be wrong again, but we're going to go just a teensy weensy bit farther than pointing out that Obamacare was dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation as a market-based approach to health care; he also didn't study up much on the Koreas.

Because while it's true that North Korea sucks (just look at what passes for animated cartoons there, for starters), there's a small detail Dave Brat the Free Market Genius sort of missed: South Korea, the land of unfettered market capitalism, actually has universal, single-payer health insurance that covers all South Koreans. You know, like all the other sane, industrialized democracies except the USA. The South Korean system is funded through pooled contributions from private employers, premiums from self-employed people, the national government, and a hefty tax on tobacco. Everybody's covered -- why, they don't even have anything like our red states' beautiful liberty-enhancing refusal to expand Medicaid, so even the most useless poors must suffer under the oppressive yoke of having decent health care.

It's a wonder that South Korea can even keep the lights on, that's for sure.

On the other hand, if Rep. Brat is genuinely going on the record here and endorsing a move toward adopting a South Korean-style health care system, then OK, sure, we could live with that. For freedom and stuff.

[ RightWingWatch / TPM / Health Care System Structure and Delivery in the Republic of Korea: Considerations for Health Care Reform Implementation in the United States ]