GOP front runner Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) got thoroughly beat-up by his fellow candidates at last night’s CNN/Tea Party debate over his executive order mandating that girls in Texas receive the HPV vaccine, which prevents cervical cancer. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) had a particularly ferocious response, saying, “To have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong.” Bachmann also sent out a letter to supporters reiterating her claim during the debate that as a mother, she’s “offended” by Perry’s decision.

After the debate, she took her attack one step further and said she had met with a mother who told her “that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.” “This is the very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions,” she added.

Today Rick Perry hit back against Bachmann’s false accusations that there is any connection between the HPV vaccine and mental retardation:

Perry dismissed that idea as similar to debunked theories linking vaccinations to autism.

“You heard the same arguments about giving our children protections from some of the childhood diseases, and they were.. autism was part of that. Now we’ve subsequently found out that was generated and not true,”

“I would suggest to you that this issue about Gardasil and making it available was about saving people’s lives,” he added.

While Bachmann’s accusations that Perry was motivated by close connections to pharmaceutical companies that stood to profit from his executive order are well-founded, her claims about the medical risks of Gardasil are patently false. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has affirmed that “HPV vaccines were studied in thousands of people in many countries around the world” and the data found that “both HPV vaccines were safe and cause no serious side effects.”

Evan Siegfried, a spokesman for the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership, told Politico, “Congresswoman Bachmann’s decision to spread fear of vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible” and that “there is zero credible scientific evidence that vaccines cause mental retardation or autism. She should cease trying to foment fear in order to advance her political agenda.” Even Rush Limbaugh said Bachmann went too far.

The fact that Rick Perry had to correct Bachmann on a question of science is a disturbing example of the blind leading the blind. Perry has backed off his executive order since jumping into the GOP race, and his campaign said yesterday, “in hindsight, his order was a mistake because citizens should have had the opportunity to express their opinions beforehand on such a sensitive issue.”

Wolf Blitzer’s question about how a Republican president would provide health care to a 30-year-old uninsured man who is in need of six months of intensive treatment elicited calls to let the person die from the audience at last night’s Tea Party/CNN debate, but it also revealed the inadequacy of the GOP’s health care prescriptions. The eight Republican candidates may not have joined the audience cheering, but their health care proposals would do little to help chronically ill and uninsured Americans.

All of the candidates have pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, adding 32 million people to the rolls of the uninsured, increasing health care premiums for American families and growing the national deficit by $230 billion over 10 years. They would effectively reset the progress in expanding coverage and containing costs and offer a series of market-driven solutions that do little more than shift the cost and risk of coverage onto the individual.

In the meantime — as their replacement legislation makes its way through Congress — 45,000 Americans will die every year because they lack health care coverage, and thousands more could see their policies canceled or denied by private insurers that are more interested in reducing risk and increasing profit than they are in offering meaningful insurance to those who need it. Recent data compiled by the federal government found that while insurers turn down applicants for coverage at different rates depending on geographical location, “denial rates routinely exceed 20 percent and often are much higher.” One study of 459 insurers found that “a quarter of insurers had denial rates of 15 percent or below and a quarter had rates of 40 percent or higher.”

The GOP’s proposals would further deregulate the insurance market without providing adequate coverage to the sickest Americans or significantly reducing health care costs. For instance, front runner Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reform would have provided health security to the 30-year-old without insurance, his plan for America likely won’t:

1. Romney would “reform the tax code to promote the individual ownership of health insurance” and “give individuals a choice between the current system and a tax deduction to buy insurance on their own.” He thinks this would create “the best of both worlds” by allowing certain individuals to leave their employer-sponsored health insurance plans and find coverage on the individual market. But this would only entice young healthy workers to buy cheaper but less substantive insurance in the individual insurance plan market place, increasing costs for sicker workers and forcing some to opt out entirely. Among those who would lose their health care are 56 million Americans with pre-existing chronic health conditions. Meanwhile, if the tax credit would have encouraged the 30-year-old to purchase insurance in the first place, it’s unclear that it would have covered the full cost or the policy or if he would have even qualified for a plan.

2. Romney says that “individuals who are continuously covered for a specified period of time may not be denied access to insurance because of pre-existing conditions” — that’s a start, but it doesn’t offer the kind of blanket protection for pre-existing condition exclusions that’s found in the Affordable Care Act and it’s unclear if our test case would have fit Romney’s definition of continuous coverage.

3. Under Romney’s proposal, the 30-year-old could have also purchased insurance across state lines, free from what Romney describes as “costly state benefit requirements.” But if the insurance he buys doesn’t provide coverage for the chronic care he needs — what good is it? Romney’s plan allows insurers would be able to circumvent consumer protections in certain states and sell bare-bone subprime policies to the healthiest (and most profitable) beneficiaries. Companies would have little incentive to do business in states that require coverage for such things as cancer screenings and sell plans across the country that deny coverage altogether to high-cost cases.

4. Finally, Romney proposes establishing Health Savings Accounts and eliminating “the minimum deductible requirement for HSAs.” This may help some healthy people but will do little to aid the 30-year-old with expensive chronic conditions who will quickly deplete his savings accounts.

During last night’s CNN/Tea Party debate, Michele Bachmann warned the nation that the 2012 presidential is “going to decide if we have socialized medicine in this country” and repriced her argument that President Obama secretly “embedded” millions of dollars in “post-dated checks” to implement the Affordable Care Act outside of congressional scrutiny:

BACHMANN: This is the election that’s going to decide if we have socialized medicine in this country or not. This is it.

Why? I just have to say this. It’s because President Obama embedded $105,464,000,000 in Obamacare in post-dated checks to implement this bill. We are never going to get rid of it unless we have a president committed to getting rid of it. And if you believe that states can have it and that it’s constitutional, you’re not committed. If you’ve implemented this in your state, you’re not committed. I’m committed to repealing Obamacare.

Watch it:

Bachmann and a small group of conservative House lawmakers invented the notion that Democrats snuck in $105 billion in hidden mandatory spending into the health care law back in March, arguing that “This is something that wasn’t known…This money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bill.” Bachmann even actively raised money off her “discovery.”

But the mandatory spending was, in fact, openly discussed in the various Congressional Budget Office estimates of health care reform. For instance, this CBO estimate from Dec. 19, 2009 addressed the effects of “mandatory appropriations for the Prevention and Public Health Fund,” “community health centers” and “the National Health Service Corps.” In an earlier document from November 2009, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf writes, “For example, the House bill would finance the operations of the insurance exchanges through mandatory appropriations rather than a surcharge on the plans offered in the exchanges. ” (The word “mandatory” is used throughout this CBO compilation of health care related documents).

Both parties have relied on both mandatory and discretionary spending to fund various initiatives (in 2003, the Republican-led Congress passed legislation that included over $400 billion of mandatory spending that was not paid for in the Medicare Drug Bill.) In fact, the mandatory spending in the health law — which was used to provide some programs with stable funding — funded Republican-supported initiatives like providing states with flexibility to design their own state-based exchanges and investing in primary care and prevention.

Michele Bachmann ripped into Rick Perry for issuing an executive order requiring Texas girls to receive vaccinations for the HPV virus, which could lead to cervical cancer, accusing him of “crony capitalism.” Perry’s decision to sign the mandate in February 2007 sparked a backlash within the Republican party and eventually led the state legislature to override the order. Perry succumbed to the lawmakers’ wishes, but continued to defend the order until he began campaigning for the GOP nomination.

During her appearance on the TODAY show this morning, Bachmann argued that Perry acted at the behest of Merck, which was then lobbying state legislatures to mandate the vaccine and had donated $6,000 to the governor’s re-election campaign:

LAUER: You questioned the motivation behind it, suggesting rather strongly, that this could have been an attempt to appease a big drug company Merck because they contributed to his campaign. So I want you to lay this out for me, is that what you are asserting?

BACHMANN: Well, it’s very clear that crony capitalism could have likely been the cause. Because the Governor’s former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company….people have to draw their own conclusions.

Watch it:

Merck doubled its lobbying budget in Texas while the state was considering its vaccination, funneling funds through Women in Government, an advocacy group with close ties to Perry. By then, Perry’s former chief of staff — Mike Toomey — had become a lobbyist for the drug manufacturer, and the mother-in-law of another chief of staff served as a state director for Women in Government.

Perry himself received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign in 2006 and nearly $30,000 in donations from the drug company over his decade as governor of Texas. Merck also renewed its annual donation of $50,000 to the Republican Governor’s Association, which he headed at the time. The AP reported that “Perry’s chief of staff had met with key aides about the vaccine on Oct. 16, the same day Merck’s political action committee” donated to the governor. Toomey now chairs “a pro-Perry Super PAC with the stated goal of raising $55 million during the primary race to finance a shadow campaign for Perry.”

In the interview, Bachmann also said that a woman at last night’s debate claimed that her daughter had suffered from “mental retardation” as a result of the vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) disputes this, however, stating that “HPV vaccines were studied in thousands of people in many countries around the world” and the data found that “both HPV vaccines were safe and cause no serious side effects. The most common adverse event was injection site pain, redness and swelling.”