Before you armchair warriors send down the mother of all missiles on North Korea, just in case they might be thinking of nuking Melbourne, some facts on the ground:

The WHO has admonished the US for being the only OECD country to not have a universal health care system. North Korea has universal healthcare.

The North Korea national literacy rate for people 15 years and over is 99%. In the US, it's 86%.

This is despite 20 years of crippling sanctions on North Korea.

When are you fire-and-brimstone fanatics going to realise that there is more to life than living in democracy?

Dear Killarney,

Western medicine and education are a curse rather than a boon.

In Australia, the purpose of Medicare is to provide extra money and power to Western-conventional doctors and their Mafia, the AMA, while fining those who do not require their services, whereas the purpose of education is to indoctrinate the young in an attempt to turn them into dumb and useful cogs in the industrial-economic machinery.

If your percentage claims are correct, then this is an advantage for America.

North Koreans have no alternatives: perhaps (as you claim) they have access to medical doctors, but they have no other ways to care for their own health. For example, they don't even have access to simple hand/face cream, resulting in their skin drying, cracking and aging in the bitter cold and wind.

Due to streamlined impersonal care, In China, having even the simplest stomach operation (such as taking out the appendix or a Caesarean), results in a huge, rugged and ugly scar across the stomach. They may be functional, but they just don't bother to close the cut neatly. If that's the case in China, then surely in North Korea it's even worse. May I remind you that a large part of the North Korean population is starving and tortured in concentration camps, where the guards, both for punishment and for fun, use a hot iron to flatten women's chests.

«there is more to life than living in democracy?»

Lets find out once we actually have a democracy, OK?