In one episode of his program last year, Fox News Bill O’Reilly accused Obama of implementing Obamacare to realize his dream of a socialist America . This assertion is an example of logical fallacy of false analogy. Implementing universal healthcare system doesn’t mean one is making the country socialist and no one would call other capitalist countries like U.K., Canada, and Australia socialist even though all these three countries provide universal healthcare system to their citizens.

If universal healthcare is socialism, then free education should also qualify as socialism. Healthcare like education is an essential right that should be available to everyone and is not something a luxury that one can afford to live without. This assertion ignores the simple fact that there is no country in the world that is purely capitalist because some goods such as public goods can only be efficiently provided by the government.

If universal healthcare system is making the US a socialist country, then it’s a lost cause because US is already a socialist country since it provides welfare services such as food stamps, low-cost housing, and even healthcare assistance to needy in the form of Medicaid and Medicare already. O’Reilly’s assertion is nothing but an attempt to exploit the fears of his followers as well as take advantage of the fact that socialism has quite a negative stigma in the west. Thus, it can also be argued that O’Reilly is emotionally exploiting his viewers by convincing them that Obamacare is a part of larger plan to convert the country into a socialist one.