On Thursday, The New York Times ran an op-ed by columnist Timothy Egan, who compared opposition to Obamacare to opposition to slavery. In fact, he went even further: he suggested that President Obama’s lie – the statement that if Americans liked their health insurance plans they could keep them – was Lincolnesque. In 1861, before the outbreak of the Civil War, Egan wrote, Lincoln said he did not want to “interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.” Egan then wrote:

He was saying to a Confederacy that would enshrine owning another human being in its new constitution: If you like the slaves you’ve got now, you can keep them. It was a lie in the sense that Lincoln made a promise, changed by circumstances, that he broke less than two years later -- and probably never meant to keep.

That is nothing like Obama’s lie – Obama never intended for Americans to be able to keep their plans. And forcing Americans off their health insurance, of course, is nothing like freeing human beings from enslavement. And broadening the scope of a national objective after war breaks out is also a far cry from simply fibbing to Americans about their market choices.

But Egan still made the case that Obama is Lincoln, and that the modern south is a newfangled anti-healthcare confederacy:

As inapt as those comparisons are, what is distressingly similar today is how the South is once again committed to taking a backward path. By refusing to expand health care for the working poor through Medicaid, which is paid for by the federal government under Obamacare, most of the old Confederacy is committed to keeping millions of its own fellow citizens in poverty and poor health. They are dooming themselves, further, as the Left-Behind States.

The only problem with this statement is that it is completely false. It is states like California that are dooming themselves by embracing Obamacare, encouraging thousands of Californians to sign up for Medi-Cal and Medicaid in order to comply with the adoption of the Affordable Care Act. But Egan added:

What we could see, 10 years from now, is a Mason-Dixon line of health care. One side (with exceptions for conservative Midwest and mountain states) would be the insured North, a place where health care coverage was affordable and available to most people.

This is sheer nonsense. Egan is making the case that the federal government mandating Obamacare means that states should aid in the destruction of their own healthcare systems. In truth, it is the states that most readily adopt Obamacare rather than resisting it at every turn that will draw the medical practitioners necessary to keep medical care affordable. There is a reason premiums under the Obamacare exchanges are significantly higher for those who make good decisions than comparable rates on the open market.

But the implication is clear: Obama isn’t just Lincoln fighting the South, he’s a black Lincoln fighting the South.