21 Things Less Bad Than Obamacare, According to Ben Carson

Alex Seitz-Wald

Speaking at the Values Voters Summit in Washington on Friday, conservative commentator Ben Carson declared that "Obamacare is, really I think, the worst thing that's happened in this nation since slavery."

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Carson, a retired prominent neurosurgeon, rocketed onto the conservative scene in February when he lambasted President Obama--who was sitting just a few feet away--at a prayer breakfast. Since then, he's inked a columnist deal with The Washington Times and earned buzz as a long-shot presidential candidate.

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Carson has never shied away from rhetorical bomb-throwing, and Friday was no different when he made his slavery remark. Carson, who is African-American, explained that Obamacare "was never about health care; it was about control" and making Americans "subservient." Given that logic, here a few things that have happened since the abolition of slavery that are apparently, according to Carson, less bad than Obamacare:

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  • 9/11

  • AIDS

  • Hurricane Katrina (and all other hurricanes since 1865)

  • The Great Depression

  • The Dust Bowl

  • Pearl Harbor

  • The assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK

  • The assassination of Abraham Lincoln

  • The attempted assassinations of Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt

  • The sinking of the Titanic

  • Every tornado since 1865

  • World War I

  • World War II 

  • Black Hawk Down

  • Jim Crow

  • Japanese internment

  • The Challenger space-shuttle disaster

  • Watergate

  • The Vietnam War

  • The Crack Wars

  • Nickelback

For more, we'll let Billy Joel take it away.

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