Reply #21: There's a story in the Minneapolis paper about how United Health

[Lydia Leftcoast]

(which is headquartered in MN but not allowed to sell policies here, which should tell you something) suggesting "cost-saving ideas," all of which added up to "We'll disallow more things."

The ensuing online discussion has over 250 posts, with the point man for the insurance companies being one "Rip Anderson," who always shows up on threads talking about health care. After today's session, I googled him, and he's either a nuclear power advocate or an aid to Norm Coleman.

Anyway, he talks about "Canadians flooding into clinics across the U.S. border," and I wrote back that I have relatives in a town on the Canadian border, and they have never reported their clinics being "flooded" by Canadians.

As happens whenever I try to inject facts into such discussions, the wingnuts give me unfavorable ratings. Basically, they're selfish jerks, who become indignant at the idea that they might somehow be paying for someone else's health care (never mind that someone else may be paying for THEIR health care at the same time).

I even contributed a lengthy post about how the systems in Canada, the UK, and Japan really work (the wingnuts think they're all the same), and it got 3/4 "disagree" points.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/46240177.html?elr=KArks8c7PaP3E77K_3c::D3aDhUec7PaP3E77K_0c::D3aDhUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU