Neal Boortz is Crazy

We get Boortz's show here in Tallahassee and I happened to catch a bit of it the other day. My mp3 player was in my wife's car, Click and Clack were on NPR and I can't stand listening to "music" stations owned by Clear Channel or Cumulus, so I figured I'd catch a few minutes of what the other side had to say.

Boortz was on. It didn't take him 10 seconds to launch into a lie. He claimed that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were pursuing nationalized health care, something that both of their plans explicitly avoid. This is why so many liberals have complained about their plans, they aren't particularly liberal plans. That didn't stop Boortz from going crazy and talking about how health care in Canada sucks so bad.



The biggest problem with this is that Canada is not nationalized. It is mostly private care which about 70% of is paid for with public funds. "Nationalized" health care is a program owned wholly by the government. That isn't what Canada has and isn't what Clinton or Obama or any pretty much any other major Democrat is pursuing, either. Some are pursuing single-payer health care, but not nationalized. Also, Canada does better than the U.S. on pretty much every health statistic possible. Sure, they have some problems, but not nearly as many as we do and they pay a lot less per person for health care (as a percent of GDP) while getting significantly better results. For clarification, the countries that have nationalized health care, for the most part, beat both Canada and the U.S. in health statistics.

He claimed to know of a doctor who makes a living off of Canadian citizens who come to Florida for treatment because the treatment is so bad up north. This sounds like complete nonsense for several reasons (like a Reagan "welfare queen"), but most importantly is that my father is actually Canadian and he recently moved back to Canada because the care was better and cheaper than here in the U.S.

Boortz went nonpolitical for a while and let a guest (who was sane) talk for a while, then he went to commercial and I mercifully didn't have to listen any further, since I had arrived home. I did happen to catch Boortz air a commercial where he claimed credit ("That's the kind of guy I am!") for a promotional discount that I heard about two years ago on the Al Franken show. It's a discount the company offers on all kinds of shows, but Boortz claimed that it was his doing. He can't even be honest in commercials.