My undergrad degree was in mathematics.  I am sure some of the TL readers remember the movie "A Beautiful Mind".  Lots of folks who were math majors were in love with the discipline, I know I was.  But sad to say I also had a poor algebra teacher in the ninth grade so I understand  your point.

Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Of course, you will have to purchase Microsoft Road.

Gilligan: The traffic started getting rough; the chicken had to cross. If not for the plumage of its peerless tail, the chicken would be lost. The chicken would be lost!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken had crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

H. R. Haldeman: I can't recall.

Thomas Hardy: Some blessed hope, whereof it knew, and I was unaware.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
[...snip...]
 Martin Luther King: It had a dream.

Martin Luther King: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

James Tiberius Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Who knew someone would put this much effort into answering the question, eh?

(And as a former Kmart assistant manager, I can tell you that just because the store closes at say 9 pm [as we did on Thanksgiving night - even 20 years ago], that doesn't mean we got to leave at 9 pm. There were still customers in the store, things had to be straightened up, and we had to make sure all the Black Friday ad signs were up.  I usually got out of there around 10 pm.  The fun part was having to be at work again at 4:30 a.m. the next day because the store opened at 5 am on BF.)

"The things you own end up owning you."

But for this statement, might the court have reached a different result?

"He told a bar association meeting that he intended to have a lot of fun at that trial."

My mother's doctor billed her for the office visit at the time of service, she paid for it, the office submitted the Medicare forms and the reimbursement went directly to my mother instead of to the doctor.

As for restrictions on certain kinds of treatment, how is Medicare different from any other insurance company in that regard?  

Prior to going on Medicare, my doctors wanted me to participate in a clinical trial but the employee insurance I had would not cover any aspect of my cancer treatment if I chose to participate. My doctors appealed the decision several times but to no avail. If I participated in the trial, the insurance would not even pay for the standard and ordinary treatment. The trial would have picked up all the expenses for anything that was even slightly different.

People who were on Medicare had no problem participating in the trial.

Critics who want radical changes in Medicare, the public insurance program for the elderly and disabled, often allege that the program is heading for disaster because stingy payments from the government are causing a rising number of doctors to refuse to serve Medicare patients...

The analysts looked at seven years of federal survey data and found that doctors are not fleeing Medicare in droves; in fact, the percentage of doctors accepting new Medicare patients actually rose to 90.7 percent in 2012 from 87.9 percent in 2005. They are not shunning Medicare patients for better-paying private patients, either; the percentage of doctors accepting new Medicare patients in recent years was slightly higher than the percentage accepting new privately insured patients...

Link

My aunt subsequently called my mother on the phone to plead with her brother and get him to relent. Mom immediately drove down to San Diego with my sister, where she confronted her older brother about mistreating his dying wife. When he got defensive and noted his concerns about possible addiction, she said so what, and proceeded to chastise him for denying aid and comfort to the woman he loved in her final days.

My sister later told me it was one of the most painful family scenes she's ever witnessed, and she wished was hadn't been there to see it. My uncle is very hardheaded and set in his ways, while my mother can prove herself equally unyielding if she feels she's in the right.

It reached a point where my mother phoned her sister-in-law's doctor, who came over to the house in person to reassure my uncle that his wife's case was indeed terminal. In denial, he instead got angry and stormed off, yelling at my mother to "do whatever the hell you want."

He returned to the house a short time later, tearfully apologized for his abusive behavior, and agreed to allow my aunt her morphine. She died one month later at home.

I'm sharing this story because there are many people amongst us -- and we know who we are -- who neither work in regulatory agencies or law enforcement, but who nevertheless really need to purge themselves of some preconceived but ridiculously outdated notions about the use and misuse of narcotic medications.

Further, each of us should educate ourselves about the issue of pain management therapies and regimens in the treatment of the chronically and terminally ill, in anticipation of the possible day when that could be one of us pleading for relief from our suffering. Otherwise, our old wives' tales about drugs will remain with us for the foreseeable future.

It is absolutely true that people are being notified by their insurance companies that their current policies are being discontinued because they are not ACA-compliant, and are being told that if they want to stay with that company, they will need to reapply.

And what they are finding is that the networks are thinner, participating providers are fewer, and if they want a premium that is equivalent to what they were paying before, it comes with higher deductibles and co-pays.

That is happening all over the country - and for sure it is happening to CareFirst subscribers here in MD, because my son-in-law got just such a letter.

It's probably also not correct to declare the ACA a failure, since no one has officially used any ACA-compliant plan yet, and it may be reasonable to expect those who need insurance the most to be the first in line to enroll, but the success of this new system is going to depend on there being more healthy people in the pool than sick ones - and so far, that's not how the numbers are skewing.

And, if those who qualify for Medicaid via the exchange far outnumber those who don't, that's going to place an additional burden on the system that wasn't planned for.