14 posts tagged “neal boortz”

The other night, I tuned into the Dennis Miller talk show on the car radio only to find a guest, Dr Drew Pinsky, hosting the show for the night.  It's a conservative show, but considering that this is all that's available in my area, I listen to it and others just to see what the other side is thinking.

Dr Pinsky was hosting an open forum for those who had misgivings about the Obama health care plan to call in and voice their concerns.

I was surprised to hear the doctor state to a caller that though he had problems with the Obama plan, he did agree that our current system is broken and that the goal is to ensure that no one in the US has to go without access to health care.  I don't remember his exact words, but this was the gist of it.

Though I was not able to listen to this show in its entirety, this attitude was markedly different from most other conservatives I've either read or heard.

For instance, the other night a man called the Neal Boortz show, explaining to him that he was not able to get health insurance, though he was willing and able to pay for it, because he had a chronic health problem.  He challenged Boortz to tell him what he thought the solution should be in such a situation.

Boortz essentially told him that it wasn't his problem, which I hear much more commonly from conservatives.  He asked the man if he actually expected him to pay for the health care of another person in such a situation, trotting out his tired complaint, "should the government be able to take away a portion of my life"(some of the money that he'd earned) to pay for stranger's health care?

The man quickly responded that, yes, that he'd be glad to contribute to Boortz' care if it had been him in the same situation.

Boortz didn't propose any sort of better solution to the man's problem, but took the attitude of "Oh, well, too bad for you."  I wonder if he expects people in this situation to just shut up, go sit in a corner, and wait to die?  It makes me wonder how the man can manage to sleep at night..

I've not heard any conservatives offer any workable solutions to the goal which Pinsky defined and supported.  They are against the Obama plan, but they're not offering a better one, either. 

The Obama plan may not be perfect, but it's a damned sight better than throwing up one's hands and telling the uninsured, "Too bad for you -- you'd better start praying that you don't get sick".

Thoughts?

Listening to the Neal Boortz show the other night, I heard him ragging on liberals who have decided to boycott Whole Foods because of an editorial Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote in the Wall Street Journal where he stated that "universal healthcare is no more a right than food or shelter."

Boortz believes the boycott is misguided because Whole Foods pays 100% of employees' premiums, but no deductibles, for everyone who clocks in 30 hours or more per week. Then it gives these workers $1,800 a year in "health care dollars" to use for health and wellness expenses.

Whether or not the boycott is justified isn't the point of this blog entry.  My point is to call attention to Boortz' hypocrisy in light of a broadcast he'd made about a week earlier than this one.

In the earlier broadcast, Boortz talked about a stationery shop he'd patronized for several years.  One day while shopping at this store, he noticed the owner leaving his car, which has pro-Obama stickers on them.  At that moment, Boortz decided to never shop there again, despite the fact that he'd always been given good service there and had nothing to complain about.  He chose to boycott this store only because the owner had voted for Barack Obama.

He went on to say that voting with one's wallet is a time-honored way of expressing one's opinion in a free market society, blah, blah, blah.

Pot, meet kettle.

I'm guessing Boortz won't be trotting out that old voting with one's wallet theme when it comes to the 36 sponsors who have chosen to withdraw their sponsorship from Glenn Beck's show, either..

The other day, I was monitoring the Neal Boortz radio show and he was on yet another one of his rants against changing the American health care system.

Not only does he oppose a nationalized health insurance system, he also believes that the current private system should abolish coverage for routine, preventive care. He stated that he believed insurance should be reserved for major catastrophic illnesses only and that people should have to pay coimpletely out of their own pockets for routine care, regardless of income.

He used pregnancy and childbirth as an example of what should not be covered by insurance because, in his words, “People choose to have children”. He blithely asserted that if one could not afford to pay for such care, then they had no business having children at all, as they could not obviously handle the costs of raising such a child.

Never mind that one does not have to come up with the entire cost of raising a child to 18 all at once, as one would have to for pre-natal care and delivery.

And his elitist mind doesn’t seem to have thought things through all that carefully. After all, if only the affluent are to be allowed to reproduce, then who will be left to flip the burgers, drive the taxis, clean the houses, and so on? I can’t imagine he expects the scions of blueblooded families to have to stoop to such labor themselves!

Boortz, while ranting and raving about all the money it would cost to convert to a health care system like the rest of the civilized world has, also seems to conveniently forget that full access to routine and preventive health care, which is far more inexpensive than catastrophic health care, is the most effective way of reducing the need for the major medical care in the first place.

It also has the benefit of giving poor people a less expensive and time consuming alternative than having to use the emergency room for routine problems, thus allowing medical personnel to more efficiently serve those patients whom emergency care was originally designed for, which, again, would reduce costs.

Some Americans, who are fortunate enough to have good jobs which provide adequate health insurance, oppose changes to our health care system, fearing that such a change would reduce the quality of the care they receive.

While it is true that American health care is among the best in the world — provided that one can gain access to it — not all Americans have full access to it.

I was browsing Rubicon’s blog today, where he stated in a comment to another reader:

I have excellent health insurance, that includes dental, mental health, emergency room visits, and hospital stays. I can be referred to a specialist with no wait time, if I would need it I could have any procedure done immediately, and I can receive care by most any doctor and can go to any hospital, no wait, no muss, no fuss. Why in the world would I want that taken away from me??

I’m not as lucky as Rubicon — my job provides no health insurance at all  and pays me so little than I cannot afford to buy my own.  And I’m a worker, not a welfare recipient.   In reponse to his last question, I would ask, “Why don’t you want all Americans, regardless of income, to have full access to that wonderful health care?”

He speaks of people having to wait for medical procedures under Canada’s health care system.   Well, I’d much rather have to wait to get a needed procedure done, than not to be able to get the procedure at all.

What follows below is my reponse to his comments on his blog:

So far as the “wonderful” American health care system goes; yes, we have great health care here — if you have a good enough job, that is.

For those of us who don’t have good enough jobs, like me, those of us with no health insurance or inadequate health insurance, access to health care, especially the routine preventive care that can forestall major medical illnesses down the road, is extremely limited.

I have no health insurance and have not for nearly five years now, nor does my job provide any paid sick leave whatsoever. It’s easy to say “why don’t you get another job”, but the reality is quite different. My town was recently voted by Fortune magazine as being one of the “10 Worst Small Cities” in which to get a job. in other words, I’m lucky just to have a job at all right now. And people I know who have better jobs than me, who formerly had adequate health insurance, are now underinsured, with ther companies scaling back on the quality of insurance offered in order to save money.

As one without health insurance, nor the resources to buy my own, and also ineligible for Medicaid because I’m not on welfare nor have minor children living in my home, the situation is pretty grim. Health care for me is pretty much limited to praying that I don’t get sick. I can’t go to the doc for any sort of preventive health care and am pretty much limited to resorting to the emergency room for a dire emergency, the circumstances of which could have likely been avoided with the preventive health care I can’t afford.

Presently, I have a cataract in one eye and am effectively blind in that eye. I can’t afford the operation that would easily restore normal sight in that eye, nor could I afford to take unpaid time off from work to convalesce from such an operation even if I could find a doctor to donate his services. I can only pray the other eye doesn’t go as well.

And I think there’s something seriously wrong that in the richest nation on Earth, I have no access to a simple operation that would easily restore normal sight to that eye, simply because I don’t have a good enough job.

Unrestricted access to health care for everyone, from the lowliest prison inmate to the wealthiest philanthropist should be a given in any civilized society and no one should be denied full access because of a lack of money. It’s just that simple. If our society can find money to build the bombs, then it certainly can find the money to pay the doctors and hospitals.

Recently the Tinfoil Hat Brigade, aka "conspiracy theorists", have added a new facet to their arsenal of idiocy.

What I'm referring to are the "Birthers"; those who believe that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, thus making him ineligible to be President.

Do these morons not know that Obama had to have had his background thoroughly checked out before he was allowed to take the Oath of Office?

I understand that they're not happy that Obama won the election, but is probably one of the most extreme cases of sour grapes that I've ever seen.   These folks need to give it up, accept reality, and to get a life already. 

Obama won.  Their guy didn't.   Deal with it and move on.

I do have to admit, however, that I laughed when even Neal Boortz called them "moonbats", then whined that they were making conservatives look bad.  Well, Boortz and others of his ilk do a pretty good job of that all by themselves, but I suppose a some contributions from the Looney Tunes section of the Republican Party can't hurt, either.

The other day, I had the misfortune to listen to Neal Boortz ranting about health care reform. 

Boortz believes that even employer-provided health insurance should be cut to the bone and not cover any type of routine medical care; that it should be reserved solely for complications from routine medical matters and catastrophic health problems.

As an example, he asserted that one's health insurance should not cover routine childbirth and prenatal care, because people "choose" to have children.    He estimated that a garden variety vaginal birth costs about ten thousand dollars nowadays and that if people cannot come up with ten grand over the space of nine months to pay for having a child, then they had no business having children in the first place.  He went on to say that with the cost of raising a child to age 18 estimated to be about a quarter of a million dollars (in his estimation), that ten grand is a "paltry" amount.

Where to begin?  For one thing, even if his estimate of the cost of raising a child to 18 is anything at all realistic, it wouldn't be that high for everyone and it's a cost that one doesn't have to come up with all at once.  Ten thousand dollars is a big chunk of change to come up with in a limited time frame for many people, even those in the middle class, 

Boortz betrays his elitism and implies a belief that only those above a certain income level have any business having children at all.  He's being rather shortsighted here, because I'm guessing he doesn't expect the little spoiled scions of the blueblooded families he so reveres to grow up to flip the burgers, fix the cars, drive the taxis, and so on.

He believes that people should save their money for routine health care and personally pay for such care out of their own pockets.  Never mind that people nowadays are having trouble paying their mortgages and even basic survival expenses in an economy beset by massive layoffs and cutbacks in the employment sector.  This might have been a valid argument in 1945 when my much-older brother was born and the entire cost of labor, delivery, and a ten day hospital stay for my mother was a whopping $73, but it's highly unrealistic today.

For more serious illness, he believes that everyone should buy private health insurance with a high deductible; five thousand dollars was his suggestion.  Again, he assumes that it's no big deal for anyone to come up with that sum, either not realizing or not caring that this would be impossible for many people.  I can only assume that he thinks those who cannot cough up five grand should do the world a favor and quietly crawl into a hole and die.

Boortz also has the curious convoluted belief that government supported health care is "stealing" parts of people's lives from them; in the form of the taxes they pay represented by the time it took them to earn the money that is paid in such taxes.   He views it as nothing less than putting a gun to the heads of taxpayers and taking their money.   I never hear Boortz make this argument about the taxes we pay to fund the military, for example.   I guess it's only an outrage when one's tax dollars go to help the less fortunate. It's fine with him when it comes to things such as the military, though the time spent to earn the tax money that is "stolen" is just the same.  It's the fact that it's going to help people that galls him about government assistance with health care costs.

He also went on a tear about his belief that a big reason why GM is going under is because of all the money they have to spend on health insurance for their employees, which in turn makes them less profitable and unable to compete with foreign automakers..

The man blithely stated this opinion, unaware that he'd painted himself into a corner with this reasoning.  Did it not ever occur to him that the employees of such foreign automarkers live in countries with GOVERNMENT provided health care and that it would help American automakers similarly if we followed suit with our own health care?

After this point, my head was about to implode from listening to him, so I didn't hear what else he had to say on the subject.

Thoughts?

As part of my habit of monitoring right wing talk radio as a method of knowing one's opposition, I regularly tune in to the Neal Boortz show.  As anyone who has read my blog regularly knows, I can't stand the guy.  He labels himself a libertarian conservative and his philosophy could be characterized as objectivism in the Ayn Rand vein.   But I just call him an elitist, as one of his favorite topics to harp on is what he calls "wealth envy", which is his particular spin on justifying selfishness and his disdain for poor people and others in unfortunate circumstances. 

But sometimes the man surprises me.  Recently, he's been getting a spate of callers of the tinfoil hat brigade variety who call in to rant about President Obama, saying he "hates America" and wants to "destroy our country."

To my surprise, and to be perfectly fair, Boortz always corrects such callers.  He tells them that the President doesn't hate America, nor does he want to "destroy" it, but rather that he's got a different idea from the caller (and him) on what makes America great.

True enough and a perfectly rational answer.  It's a shame he's not as even-handed about other topics with conflicting viewpoints as well.

But then he goes on to say that Barack Obama believes that government is what makes this country great, unlike himself and the caller who believe that America is great because of its people and freedom (which he defines primarly as economic freedom, especially from the perspective of the wealthy).  He implies that this also means that Obama believes the bigger the government, the better.

I find that highly misleading.  For one thing, all politicians, regardless of party,  "believe" in government in that they have been elected to it and seek to promote governmental policies that they believe are effective and useful.  They "believe in government in that they wish to effect changes by working within the system as elected representatives, instead of through the private sector.

And it doesn't logically follow that because Barack Obama is committing to working through the system to implement his policies on how to make our great country greater, that he would automatically think that simply making it bigger would be his goal.  Rather, he wants to work within the system to make government work better and more effectively, rather than simply increasing its size.

It's his perfect right to deride the role of government in our society, but unless the highly unlikely scenario occurs in that we turn into an anarchistic society, we will have a government of some sort.  It seems to me that it would be better to talk about ways of improving government, rather than denigrating its role in a civilized society at every given opportunity..

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith

They'll have us living for the benefit of our fellow man instead of us living for our own individual benefit!
--Neal Boortz, in reference to liberals and Democrats.

I heard Boortz make the second comment on one of his recent broadcasts, which is but one of many illustrations of what makes the first statement true.. I'm not sure if I remember his exact words precisely, but this is the gist of them.  He spoke in a tone that made clear that he found the idea of devoting one's live in service to humanity to be extremely revolting and something to be avoided.

I have to give the man credit for being totally honest, however.  Most conservatives will not so bluntly admit their complete disgust for altruism.

Thoughts?

While listening to Neil Boortz the other day, he stated quite catgorically that "Health care isn't a right, it's a privilege".

I don't know about you, but I was brought up to believe that an essential tenet of morality is that anyone who is sick or injured deserves medical treatment, no matter who they are and regardless of their ability to pay.

Indeed, when I worked in law enforcement it was considered cruel and unusual punishment to deny sick or injured arrestees and jail inmates medical care.  Access to medical care most certainly is a right in this instance.

Providing health care to anyone who needs it is part of living in a civilized, humane society.  It's not just for those who can afford comprehensive health care,  Nor should it be limited to those whom the powers-that-be in this country consider as "worthy"; no one should have their character judged prior to being deemed eligible to see a doctor.  

To deny someone health care because they are poor or, as Boortz would have it, lazy and don't want to work, is nothing less than repugnant in my book..  No one should have to work hard to earn the right to see a doctor when sick or injured.

Driving a car is a privilege.   Getting medical assistance to maintain health and to live life free of pain and debility is not.  It's a basic human right.

I've not ragged on Neal Boortz in awhile, so here goes.  I've come to the conclusion that he is a complete misanthrope; he hates everyone who isn't just like him.

His latest target?  Elderly people who live part time in Florida, aka, "Snow Birds".

While enduring one of his broadcasts the other night, he went on a tear about retirees who come to Florida when it's cold up north, and go back home in the summer.

What were the reasons the nearly sixty-five year old Boortz gave?   He complained about how many old people drive: too slow, too cautious, etc, insisting that their licenses needed to immediately be taken from them.   While it is true that many old people don't need to be driving any more, that isn't the point of this entry, so I'll confine myself to saying that a better strategy to be to create reliable and alternative ways for such people to get around and to expand low-cost deliveries of essential items, such as groceries.  I'm guessing he either doesn't realize or doesn't care that many old people don't have anyone to run their errands for them, take them to the doctor, and so on.  I agree that something needs to be done, but merely howling "take their licenses!" and leaving it at that, does nothing to solve the problem in a meaningful way.

That being said, he used this as an example of why he hates "Snow Birds".   Well, there are a lot of old people in Florida, many of them living there year round, but he didn't have anything to say about elderly people who are permanent Florida residents.   Does he think living in one state automatically improves driving skills?   Or does he think that bad driving is excusable in that instance?  

His second reason for hating "Snow Birds" was...if you can actually believe it...because many elderly people get a cart when they go into the grocery store to buy only a couple of items.  Boortz couldn't stand that such people "used the carts as a walker" by leaning over them as they walked through the store.   He was of the opinion that if you are going into the store for only a couple of items, then you had no business getting a cart.

What a fucking ass.  Did it ever occur to him that a person who does this might have a bad back and that using the cart saves them from a lot of pain?  I'm surprised he didn't rag on the folks who use store scooters or shoppers in wheelchairs as well.

I guess he longs for the "good old days" when people with physical challenges simply stayed home, out of sight, and didn't inconvenience healthier people in a hurry.

What a miserable human being this guy must be.

Yesterday, I wrote an entry ranting about Neal Boortz' elitist attitude toward people needing Section 8 housing. In the same broadcast where he made those comments, he asked a question that I wish to address in this entry.

In the segment previous to the one where he talked about Section 8, he talked about the Fairness Doctrine, a topic which strikes terror into the so-called hearts of right wing radio hosts everywhere. Boortz, along with many of his fellow ultra right wingnut pundits, believes -- or wants his readers to believe -- that liberals want the Fairness Doctrine in order to censor conservative talk radio and get them off the air.

I don't know where they get that idea from, as freedom of speech and hatred of censorship are beliefs that are central to liberalism. Rather than silencing conservative voices, liberals seek to see a broader representation of all opinions on talk radio. For us, it's not an either/or thing, it's a both/and thing.   Personally, I'd hate to see them leave the air, as listening to these wingnuts gives me a lot of rant-worthy blogging fodder, and it's a good way to monitor how the other side thinks.

I find much of what Boortz says to be reprehensible and repugnant, but I believe that to censor him and others of his ilk would be even more so. Freedom of speech is for everyone, not just for those with whom I agree. Americans still have the right to be wrong, just as long as they don't intefere with the rights of others to believe differently.

And this brings me to Boortz' question. I don't remember his exact words, but the gist was to the effect of wondering why liberal talk shows tend to end up as failures more times than not. This begs the question as to why conservative talk shows tend to have an easier time staying on the air and keeping listeners.

It's very simple. Unlike the average liberal talk show host, most conservative talk show hosts are not about civilized, reasoned debate; they specialize in low blows and ad hominem attacks. Boortz, in particular, takes great glee in being a jerk on air and rude to people with whom he disagrees, proudly referring to himself as an "equal opportunity offender".

In other words, they appeal to people's basest instincts, the lowest common denominator. They invite listeners to indulge their prejudices, justify their hate, and to blame "the Other" for their frustrations.

Conversely, most liberal pundits try to appeal to people's higher selves, to tolerate and learn to understand those who are different from ourselves, and challenge people to use complex reasoning when confronting complicated issues, and to rise above simplistic, dualistic, knee-jerk responses to troubling issues.

For many people, having to think and rise above isn't nearly as much fun as simply trashing people who are different from us and to make them the scapegoats for all the problems facing our world today.

Hence, conservative talk radio has a much easier time gaining and keeping listeners than does liberal talk radio.

Thoughts?