Steve King is still a rotten human being

So what do we stand for, then?

For the last few weeks or so I have been pointing out some of the ridiculous nonsense dribbled from the mouth of congressman Steve King, a tea-partyish representative from Iowa who has a very large mouth and a much more modest brain. He is one of the better mouthpieces for the Republican position on health care, namely, that poor people don't deserve any, especially since he is unencumbered by any silly notions of making that position palatable to others by lightening it up with a bit of more Christian-sounding drivel. Nope, what you get from Steve King is the unadulterated version: screw the uninsured, and screw them now, and screw the rest of you for thinking differently.
Here was his contribution from mid-week:

So that’s the argument that compels you to buy insurance? I’d say that doesn’t fit the interstate commerce definition that I know. And that argument came before the Supreme Court.
What i’ve said is that, in every decade, in every state, there have always been babies that were born, lived, and died, and some of them a long and healthy life, without ever using a dollar worth [sic] of health care expenditures. That would mean that they didn’t engage in interstate commerce with regard to health care.

The notion here is that (1) there are people in America who really need absolutely no health care at any point in their lives, ever—never get sick, never get injured, nothing—and (2) on the supposition that you could perhaps find such people, this invalidates efforts to even attempt to provide a minimal level of health insurance and care for every other citizen in the country, because the sick, the injured, the poor, the old, and everyone else need to bow to the whims of an imaginary few dozen people who might win the health lottery mega-jackpot of never needing a damn thing, ever, because (3) the aforementioned Randian fantasy creatures would be horribly, horribly oppressed by being forced to partake in any system that required them to give a flying shit about their fellow Americans. You know, by "forcing" them to engage in the "commerce" of universal health insurance and care.
There are, of course, numerous fallacies with what we will very, very generously call Mr. King's "argument." One, however, trumps all the others: The notion that a group of people has not needed health care, ergo those people will never need health care, because (insert magic here.) Mr. King seems to believe that needing health care for a catastrophic condition is nothing more than a lifestyle choice, akin to wearing hats, or being a very public asshole.
(Continued below the fold.)