UNITED STATES (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of Tea Party loyalists fled the United States in the early morning hours today, seeking what one of them called “the American dream of liberty from health care.”
Harland Dorrinson, 47, a tire salesman from Lexington, Kentucky, packed up his family and whatever belongings he could fit into his Chevy Suburban just hours before the health-insurance exchanges opened, joining the Tea Party’s Freedom Caravan with one goal in mind: escape from Obamacare.
“My father didn’t have health care and neither did my father’s father before him,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my children have it.”
But after driving over ten hours to the Canadian border, Mr. Dorrinson was dismayed to learn that America’s northern neighbor had been in the iron grip of health care for decades.
“The border guard was so calm when he told me, as if it was the most normal thing in the world,” he said. “It’s like he was brainwashed by health care.”
Turning away from Canada, Mr. Dorrinson joined a procession of Tea Party cars heading south to Mexico, noting, “They may have drug cartels and narcoterrorism down there, but at least they’ve kept health care out.”
Mr. Dorrinson was halfway to the southern border before he heard through the Tea Party grapevine that Mexico, too, has public health care, as do Great Britain, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, New Zealand, Slovenia, and dozens of other countries to which he had considered fleeing.
Undaunted, Mr. Dorrinson said he had begun looking into additional countries, like Chad and North Korea, but he expressed astonishment at a world seemingly overrun by health care.
“It turns out that the United States is one of the last countries on earth to get it,” he said. “It makes me proud to be an American.”