Our guest blogger is Aubrey Murray, a press intern at the Center for American Progress.

Yesterday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed the “Healthy Schools, Healthy Lives” Act into law after near-unanimous passage in the House and Senate. Under the legislation, the administration of nutrition in Florida schools will transfer from the Board of Education to the Department of Agriculture in time for the new school year. The measure passed despite a report by the Office of Program Policy and Government Accountability, which found “no compelling reason to change the current structure of Florida’s school nutrition programs”.

The man now in charge of student lunches is Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam. Putnam’s 2010 campaign received major funding from the sugar industry, and he will likely keep his sugar pals close. Putnam installed sugar magnate Tracy Duda Chapman to his transition team in December, and upon formally taking office, he drafted a letter to the Board of Education effectively halting their decision to ban sugary drinks in schools. Putnam argued the ban was incongruent with “a comprehensive look at current school foodservice offerings.” As a result, Florida schools still offer sugary drinks to their students even as 33 percent of Florida schoolchildren are overweight or obese, compared to 31 percent nationwide.

The absence of a moderating force to represent student interests in the exchange between farms and cafeterias could prove detrimental to childhood nutrition. Members of the Board of Education spoke out against the bill: “It’s the mission of the Department of Agriculture to protect the agriculture industry. It’s the mission of the Department of Education to protect children. Inherent in your bill is a conflict,” said a board member appointed by Jeb Bush in a statement to the Miami Herald. The new law also establishes a Healthy Schools for Healthy Lives Council and allows the commissioner to appoint 11 of its members.

And so it looks as though the sugar industry’s investment in Putnam paid off. Florida’s students will soon have lunches subjected to the whims of the agriculture market instead of their nutritional needs.

The United States is rapidly falling behind the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to life expectancy, and no demographic is facing a more rapid decline in life expectancy than women. According to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, the life expectancy of the American woman is not just growing too slowly — in 313 American counties, it is actually declining.

In these counties, primarily located in the Southeast, Central Appalachia, and the lower Midwest, life expectancy rates for women are as many as 50 years behind the best-performing countries. In other words, the worst female life expectancy rates in the U.S. are equal to the rate the best countries experienced in the 1950s.

Researchers and analysts caution against attributing the decline to any one factor, but say it is clear that “income plays a very large role in determining adult health outcomes,” suggesting that poverty and socioeconomic status play a key role in raising — or lowering — life expectancy. And while there may not be consensus as to why the decline is occurring, University of Wisconsin professor Dave Kindig told Remapping Debate that, to reverse the trend, the U.S. needs to strengthen its investment into public health programs, particularly those focused on preventive medicine and nutrition:

“If we tripled our investment in public health, and did it in a smart way, we would almost certainly get that money back in savings in the long run because fewer people would be going to the hospital for heart attacks and strokes and cancer and diabetes.”

But the increasing political pressure to cap health care costs, he added, creates a vicious cycle. As more money is spent on treatment, the temptation is to spend less money on public health initiatives that are aimed at prevention. With fewer funds available to increase access in underserved areas, improve environmental conditions, and enhance health awareness, even more money will have to be spent on treatment, ultimately squeezing public health budgets even further.

In Congress and state legislatures across the country, however, Republicans have targeted public health programs for drastic spending cuts or full elimination, focusing especially on programs that benefit women the most. ThinkProgress compiled a list of the most drastic cuts the GOP has attempted to make to women’s health programs:

WIC: The GOP’s initial budget sought to cut 10 percent from the 2010 spending level for the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides aid to low-income pregnant and nursing women and their infant children. The spending resolution passed on April 12, which averted a government shutdown, slashed $500 million from WIC’s 2010 spending levels. Total cuts to the program for fiscal year 2012 are estimated at $833 million.

Title X: The budget plan the GOP released in February sought to eliminate funding for Title X, which provides family planning to low-income families, altogether. The program’s $317 million budget was cut by $17 million in the April 12 spending resolution.

Planned Parenthood: The GOP took the government to the brink of shutdown over funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides millions of women with basic health services each year. The deal to avoid a shutdown kept Planned Parenthood’s funding intact, but states across the country have sought to defund its state chapters. In Indiana, defunding Planned Parenthood kept thousands of women from getting care provided by Medicaid. Wisconsin is the latest state to launch an attack on the organization.

Medicare/Medicaid: The House GOP budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) would end Medicare as we know it and turn Medicaid into a block-grant system, disproportionately hurting women. Both programs aid more women than men, and women in general retire at lower incomes than men. The average retired woman earns $14,000 in income each year — $12,000 of which comes from Social Security. Under Ryan’s plan, the average female senior would pay all of that $12,000 for Medicare coverage.

Affordable Care Act: During the health care debate, Republicans fought to prevent maternity care from becoming a standard inclusion on medical plans and attempted to keep the bill from passing despite its many benefits for women. Those benefits include better coverage of preventive procedures like mammograms and cervical cancer scans, the establishment of community health centers to make it easier for low-income women to see doctors, and coverage protection for those with pre-existing conditions, all of which will save lives and allow women to stay healthier longer. The House GOP voted to repeal the law in January and has fought to defund many of its programs, including a Free Choice Voucher program that would have helped give low-income Americans more options when they chose their health coverage had it not been gutted by Republicans.

It’s not too late for the United States to reverse the trend and begin catching up to the best countries in the world when it comes to life expectancy. But cutting programs that are vital to ensuring women’s health is not the way to do it. As Kindig told Remapping Debate, this is a “national problem” that needs to be addressed now.

“Changing these trends is very much in the social and public interest,” he said. “We can’t just assume that everybody is going to get better eventually if we continue down the same path.”

The Center on Policy and Budget Priorities (CBPP) is out with a new report criticizing President Obama for proposing reforms to the Medicaid program that would “replace the various matching rates at which the federal government reimburses states for their costs in insuring people through Medicaid and CHIP with a single ‘blended rate’ for each state.” The new rate would be “set at a level that provided the state with less federal funding than under current law,” saving money for the federal government and shifting those costs to the states. The idea, which is currently being considered in Vice President Joe Biden’s debt negotiations, is also an administrative nightmare:

Second, the federal government would find it extremely difficult to calculate each state’s blended rate fairly and accurately. Under last year’s health reform law, the federal government will pay a substantially higher matching rate (i.e., cover a much larger share of the costs) for covering the large numbers of low-income people whom that law makes newly eligible for Medicaid starting in 2014. To compute a blended rate for each state, federal officials would have to make a number of assumptions about each state’s future Medicaid and CHIP enrollment and expenditures, including how many people in each state who become newly eligible for Medicaid under health reform will actually enroll in the program and how healthy or sick they will be (since that will affect the health services that they use and, hence, their average health care costs). Federal officials also would have to estimate how many people in each state who are now eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled will enroll after health reform’s coverage expansion and insurance mandate take effect, as well as what their health status will be. These assumptions would be rife with uncertainty, because they would not be based on actual state experience. As explained below, federal officials would be making other estimates as well, for which hard data are not available, that would affect the blended rate a state is assigned.

For all the talk about finding savings within “the system,” there is actually very little meat on the Medicaid bone. The program already underpays providers and they, in turn, are turning away Medicaid patients. And so, instituting additional cuts or shifting costs to the states are ways of saving the program by throwing more people off of it.

Republicans like to tout the miracle of competition in lowering health care costs and have even proposed a budget in the House that would completely dismantle the traditional government-sponsored Medicare program and force seniors to buy insurance from an exchange of private insurers. But seniors already have the option of purchasing private coverage through Medicare Advantage and that system — which receives a 9 percent or $8.9 billion subsidy from the federal government — has produced little savings.

The Incidental Economist’s Austin Frakt links to this chart and argues that if he were a proponent of so-called “market driven” health care, “I’d be infuriated or embarrassed by this abysmal performance of MA plans. As a taxpayer, I’m none too happy“:

Clearly this figure shows us very little about what happened between 1997 and 2004. Feel free to presume that the program saved Medicare so much money in those years that it offset the documented massive costs in other years, but I doubt you’d find many serious scholars agreeing with you. No, on the whole, the program has cost us and cost us dearly.

Look:

Over the years, a number of government reports and independent estimates have found that some plans use the taxpayer subsidies to pad their bottom lines and expose beneficiaries to serious financial risks. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that some MA plans used lower premiums to attract healthier enrollees, but then hit them “with high and unexpected out-of-pocket costs.” It’s an embarrassing record indeed and one that Republicans seek to build on.

Stateline’s Pamela M. Prah examines the truthiness of the GOP’s favorite argument for block granting the Medicaid program: it worked in welfare reform. In 1996, the Congress passed and President Clinton signed a major overhaul of the welfare program, transforming it from a guaranteed entitlement into a block grant structure where “states are essentially given a set amount of money and allowed to use it as they wish.” “The amount has stayed level since 1996,” Prah notes.

Republicans would do something similar to the Medicaid program: convert the program’s matching rate financing structure — under which the federal government pays 50 to 75 percent of each state’s Medicaid costs — into a block grant system that would allow for greater state control to manage a set “block” of federal dollars that would not keep up with projected health care costs.

The comparison isn’t perfect, but the outcomes may be comparable. As Prah reports, under welfare reform, the government is saving money, but “families who need help are not being served.” “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that before TANF, the federal government and states were helping 75 out of every 100 families with children who lived in poverty. That number, the center says, dropped to 28 families for every 100 in poverty in 2008-09. In seven states, according to the center, TANF served fewer than 10 families for every 100 in poverty.”

Similarly, the GOP’s latest Medicaid block grant proposal reduces Medicaid funding by $1.4 trillion over the next decade — the federal government would spend less money, but cover fewer people. Up to 44 million beneficiaries could lose their Medicaid insurance, a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate recently concluded, a number that could potentially increase during economic downturns. It’s a pattern that’s familiar to welfare reform. When the economy was strong, earnings among single-parent families increased, even though most families remained near the poverty line. Once it slowed, employment fell and poverty increased, but the caseload numbers have flat-lined.