Rush Limbaugh’s first book, The Way Things Ought To Be, came out in 1992. Bernie Sanders was an obscure first-term congressman. The Democratic Socialists of America was a tiny fraction of its current size. The Cold War was over.

Yet Limbaugh, who died this week at the age of seventy, devoted a full chapter of his book to the dangers posed by “socialist utopians” advocating “national health care.” He didn’t quote any of these utopians, or name any names. He didn’t discuss the experience of countries that already had “national health care.” He simply asserted as fact that if we “turn[ed] over” the health care system “to the government,” the result would have “the efficiency of the Post Office and the bedside manner of the IRS.”

The line was vintage Limbaugh — comedic and boisterous and completely nonsensical. Government-run health insurance programs are more efficient than private sector equivalents. Residents of nations with “national health care” live longer than we do, have fewer of their children die as infants, and have generally better rates of “mortality amenable to health care.” They don’t stay in jobs or even marriages they hate out of fear of losing their insurance.