Dear NPR,
NPR, I'm going to be right up front here: I love you. I love This American Life and Fresh Air. I double-love Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. I even (and I realize that I am very nearly alone among the under-60 set here) love Prairie Home Companion. My local NPR affiliate is absolutely the bomb, with interviews with Simon Winchester and Glen David Gold and Tracy Kidder, and all sorts of people that make my little intellectual heart go all a-flutter. And while I'm not sure that I love All Things Considered in quite the same way as I love the aforementioned shows, I rely on it. Robert Siegel and Melissa Block keep me company on the days when it is my turn to prepare dinner. And that's definitely something.
And so it is with great sadness that I have to write this. You see, NPR, on the weekends, All Things Considered kind of sucks. And I get that. Things don't happen on the weekends as much as they do on the weekdays. Fewer people listen, so you don't want to waste your big stories. But last Sunday, you hit a new low. A Ron Paul-style low.
Ron Paul has, apparently, written a book. It is all about how the Federal Reserve is stupid and should go away. Fair enough. Any crackpot with a computer can get published these days; why not Ron Paul? But NPR? Just because someone writes a book, doesn't mean you have to interview them about it, even if that someone is an elected official. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to ask for their idiotic opinions about anything, let alone healthcare. And yet, you asked him about just that topic. And what do you know?! He has idiotic opinions! He stated that he doesn't think healthcare is a right, that he thinks we as a nation are confusing 'rights' with 'wants' and 'needs'. Substitute "not dying from completely curable and preventable illnesses" for healthcare in that last sentence, and it'll give a better sense of the implication of that sentence, but whatever. That's bad enough, but here's the real kicker: he goes on to compare people who want health insurance despite pre-existing conditions to people who wait until their house is on fire to seek out fire insurance. This statement went unchallenged.
The problem with not challenging that statement is that it's ridiculous and completely ignores the actual concerns of the uninsured, the underinsured, and everyone else who is angry about our nation's complete failure in the world of healthcare. For Ron Paul's hypothetical to be actually analogous to the health insurance situation as it stands, it would need to be about people who try to buy fire insurance only to be told that the fact that they had a car accident once 7 years ago means they're ineligible. Or even more to the point, people who successfully buy fire insurance, have a house fire, and are then told that they won't be paid anything because they forgot to disclose that they own candles, and that while the company is aware that candles were not the cause of the fire, they are still going to retrospectively cancel the policy.
NPR, I have a feeling that your giving a platform to Ron Paul is an effort to counter the suggestion that you have a liberal bias. But here's the thing: you can interview anybody you want, and conservatives are still going to call you liberal. You're not going to change their minds any more than Fox News would win me over by interviewing Dennis Kucinich. If those of us who choose to listen to you wanted to hear far-right/libertarian points of view, most of us could call certain members of our extended families. The fact is that we don't want to, particularly not when making Sunday dinner. And if you absolutely must interview Ron Paul, we would like you to at least pretend to have a spine, and challenge him when he says stupid things!
Health insurance has long been a special concern of mine. I have blogged and blogged and blogged about it. I have read the heartfelt writings of good friends about it. I have researched it. Despite all that, my health insurance still sort of sucks. So when you play stories like that, and it makes my blood pressure rise, you should be careful, NPR. I just might send you my doctor's bill; heaven knows my insurance company won't cover it.
