Everything's Bigger in Texas, Including Health Insurance Refunds

The argument that de-regulation keeps costs down makes one very big and often fallacious assumption:  that the market is healthy and competitive.  Such is not the case with the individual health insurance market.  Thus, policyholders in Texas, in which regulations are lax, found that they received higher refunds under the ACA-- because their premiums were higher to begin with.  Why were they higher?  Because any company that can get away with charging more money is going to do so.  The Laffer curve for the health insurance market looks a lot like the Laffer curve for the crack cocaine market.  There's a lot of leeway for them to jack up the price and not lose a single bit of demand, but that doesn't mean that they should be allowed to.  Sometimes, the greater good of society trumps the profits of one company or even one industry.  Society != Socialism.

Why Chik-Fil-A Is Not a First Amendment Issue

Free speech is a right.  Customers are a privilege.  Offend some of them, and you lose some of them.  This is not a violation of First Amendment rights.  It is a simple fact of doing business.  A person's private beliefs are just that-- private-- but if said person uses their company to publicly promote a particular belief (both monetarily, and by saying outright that "my company believes thus and so"), then that invites public scrutiny and invites people who disagree to take their business elsewhere.   A person can believe whatever they want, but at the end of the day, unless a particular issue affects a company's ability to do business, then the company has no business throwing their hat in that ring.