Keep in mind deductibles are not the same as they used to be.

The deductible you're talking about in your old plan would pay nothing until you reached the deductible.

The deductible in an ACA plan does not apply to a large number of routine procedures. Those are covered with a co-pay instead. For example, instead of paying full price for a check-up because you haven't hit the deductible, you pay around $10-40 depending on plan.

allowing more interstate (and international) competition in health finance options would help on that front, too

Yeah, how'd that work out for banking? Interstate competition was supposed to do things like drive down credit card interest rates.

Instead, almost every credit card in the US is issued out of Delaware or South Dakota. And interest rates are quite high. Why? Interstate competition also means competition between state legislatures for laws that are most favorable to banks.

So what would happen with interstate health insurance? Legislatures would compete for the most insurance company-friendly laws. Which would be the least consumer-friendly laws.

Really?

Please direct me to the State and Federal programs that do not require a Social Security number or a green card.

http://www.ssa.gov/

Feel free to run on eliminating it. After all, it's what you're complaining about in your post.

Also, as someone else pointed out, the statute of limitations would apply here. South Carolina has one of the shortest statute of limitations I've ever seen. It's only 3 years for both written and oral contracts.

The statute of limitations is the time limit to get a warrant. Once the warrant is issued, it lasts forever.

if you forbidden from claiming it, then you are also forbidden from regulating it

You don't regulate it based on the claim. You regulate it based on the ship.

Let's say there's a giant gold deposit on the moon, and a ship launches from the US in order to build a mining operation. The US can't say "That's our gold, you have to do this to mine it". However, the US can say "That's our ship. You have to do this while you're on the moon....and happen to be mining gold".

I was under the impression that the moon and Antarctica were covered by the same international treaty

Nope, that would be the Moon Treaty

which we are party to.

Nope. No country capable of reaching orbit has ratified the moon treaty.

There is the Outer Space Treaty, but that one doesn't bar NASA from regulating moon mining.

Witness the latest Target breach. Millions stopped shopping there and Target was (rightfully) forced to take numerous steps to draw people back in.

Because there are alternatives for shopping. I have exactly 1 choice for high-speed Internet, Time Warner Cable. When they roll out their tiered Internet and I don't like it, what do you propose I do?

A grocery store near where I lived stopped carrying a lot of things I liked to buy. So I stopped shopping there.

And if they were the only grocery store, you'd just cheerfully starve, right?

Basically any company that has customers, is accountable and will self-regulate based on customer feedback.

And when you grow up, you'll realize that this little theory only works if the customers have alternatives.

If you'd like an example: text messaging: It uses some empty space during the messages that a GSM phone has to send to the tower anyway. It costs the phone company virtually nothing (just the routing servers, which aren't pricey). Yet there are zero cell providers in the US that offer really "free" text messaging. All of them require paying more than "voice only" plans.

How about baggage fees on airlines? With every airline other than Southwest charging them, customers actually don't have alternatives.

And that doesn't even get into the situations where nominal competitors directly collude to screw over customers.

There has NEVER been a single issue with ISP's that Net Nutrality regulations would have prevented away!

So, because no ISP was violating the net neutrality rules, the net neutrality rules aren't needed.

Uh-huh.

So why have a useless regulation that increases costs for ISP's

Actually, Net Neutrality is cheaper for ISPs. They have to treat every packet the same way. That takes less hardware, software (and thus money) than inspecting each packet, determining who it is from and who it is going to, looking up the server and the customer in their "tiered Internet" database and then either delaying or blocking the packet.

While your government conspiracy theories are vaguely entertaining, you should be aware you have utterly no clue about the subject at hand.

Largely because California isn't trying to re-write science textbooks.

CA textbooks say the big bang happened and evolution is real, which has been the nationwide standard for decades. TX is trying to change that, and change is what gets media attention.

The difference between humans and animals is that doctors have industrial-strength pain-killers they will administer to humans. No matter how excruciating the pain, doctors can keep you drugged into a dream world

And here in this place called "reality", doctors do not do that. Because keeping someone so heavily drugged causes the DEA to come knocking and your license to get suspended while you're investigated.

Plus, there's lots of hospitals that are so concerned about causing drug addiction that they refuse to give sufficient doses of painkillers to be pain-free. Even on terminal patients.

HE can or could have have made the decision. Living wills, do-not resuscitate orders, etc. If he didn't want to go this way, he has (or had) that option.

Nope. Living wills can only deny treatment. Which means you have a very long and painful path you get to shuffle down until you reach the point where you need a feeding tube. And then you get to starve to death over a few days.

There's a whole lot of suffering and pain to endure between a terminal diagnosis and actually needing a feeding tube or resuscitation. There is no reason to make someone suffer through that if they do not want to.

Living wills can be ignored. What, you gonna sue while you're unconscious in a hospital bed?

In addition, living wills can only be used to deny care. For example, a living will can prevent a feeding tube, but that just means you get to starve to death.....once you are so far gone that you need a feeding tube. But it can take a very long time to get from "no hope of recovery" to needing a feeding tube, and then a few more days to actually starve to death.

It should be legal to request a lethal drug cocktail to avoid that suffering.

Congradulations! You've made the dumbest argument I've ever read on Slashdot.

Let's roll back to pre-ACA. What happens? The elderly are covered by a combination of Medicare and Medicaid (once they're destitute) so that doctors and hospitals get paid much, much more to prolong their lives.

Now after the ACA, what happens? The elderly are covered by a combination of Medicare and Medicaid (once they're destitute) so that doctors and hospitals get paid much, much more to prolong their lives.

Boy, what a gigantic shift!! But good job rolling out the talking points.

And they should take days to die from starvation-that-we-think-they-don't-feel instead of a lethal dose painkillers because............?

By having more students than Texas.

Texas's large student population creates a textbook "standard". So does California, even though the article does not discuss California.

"Red" states buy the Texas version of textbooks, "Blue" states buy the California version.