Families USA has released state-by-state reports showing the consequences of cutting Medicaid coverage for Americans with chronic conditions who rely on the program for life-saving treatments. The first batch of reports for California, Illinois, New York, and Texas finds that hundreds of thousands of patients in each state are at risk of losing coverage. In Texas:

Lawmakers from both parties have endorsed policies that would force cutbacks in Medicaid, but Texas Gov. Rick Perry has gone out of his way to try and limit the program. For instance, in 2008, he requested a federal waiver to “limit the number of beneficiaries and create a new, very sparse benefits plan” — which was too restrictive even for the Bush administration. Perry has also advocated for block granting Medicaid, which would in all likelihood force the state to make severe cutbacks, and even wanted the state to opt ouf of the program entirely. He eventually backed off that proposal after a state report concluded that up to 2.6 million Texans could become uninsured as a result.

Anti-abortion activists who have been trying to shut down an abortion clinic in Maryland took on a new and unusual target at a protest this week: the sixth grade daughter of the man who simply owns the office park where the clinic is located. On Monday, the first day of school, protesters stood at the entrance of Robert Frost Middle School with graphic posters of aborted fetuses.

Some also held banners with the landlord’s picture, his full name, his phone number and the words “Please STOP the Child Killing.” The landlord was understandably furious, as his daughter shares his last name and could be connected with him through the posters:

Antiabortion activists who have sought for months to shut down a Germantown clinic picketed its landlord outside a Montgomery County middle school where his daughter is a student, school and police officials said Monday.

A small group of protesters stood outside Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville on Thursday, holding signs and a banner, during back-to-school night, officials said.

The student’s father, who did not want to be named to protect the safety of his daughter, a sixth-grader at the school, said he saw the five protesters when he went to the school event.

The man owns the property where Dr. LeRoy Carhart is one of the few doctors in the country openly performing late-term abortions. He has been working in Maryland since Nebraska banned abortions after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion protesters have been demonstrating at the clinic since December.

On Monday, school security officials and local police worked together to try to keep protesters away from students. Nevertheless, two protesters holding antiabortion posters stood for about an hour at the school’s entrance. The landlord said he had to explain the situation to his daughter and son, who is a freshman at a nearby high school. He has also been under assault from another anti-abortion group that launched a campaign last week trying to pressure him to cancel the clinic’s lease.

“It’s horribly outrageous that they’re going out in front of a middle school,” he said. “It is way crossing the line. I very much respect the right of the protesters to do so in front of the clinic, or the steps of Capitol Hill, or the courthouse. But in front of a middle school is really not an appropriate place…”

Montgomery County schools spokeswoman Lesli Maxwell added, “The idea that a group of protesters would target a school because the child of someone they are targeting attends the school . . . is fairly despicable.”

Unfortunately, targeting people only tangentially related to abortion clinics has become a new favorite tactic of activists determined to shut down operations. In California, anti-abortion protesters recently forced a Planned Parenthood clinic to move by bullying Enterprise-Rent-A-Car into reneging on its contract to provide the center with the parking spots it needs to satisfy local zoning regulations.

Gawker’s Seth Abramovitch has a piece revisiting the heartbreaking story of Kent Snyder, the brains behind Ron Paul’s innovative online strategy during the 2008 presidential campaign, in light of the congressman’s recent comments endorsing the position that people should have the “freedom” to suffer and die from lack of health insurance. During the CNN debate earlier this week, Wolf Blitzer asked Paul if he would let an uninsured man die in a coma or would he advocate some government role in saving his life. After saying that he would let the uninsured man suffer the consequences of not having health insurance, Paul hedged slightly and said churches and charity would take care of him most likely.

But as Abramovitch notes, Snyder, a volunteer strategist who eventually became a campaign manager for Paul’s presidential bid, fell ill of pneumonia during the campaign. Snyder did not have health insurance, like the hypothetical example given by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, and stacked up $400,000 in medical bills. On June 26, 2008, exactly two weeks after Paul ended his bid for the presidency, Synder passed away due to complications from his pneumonia. Synder’s family could not pay the bills left by Snyder, so friends set up an online campaign to raise the money for Synder’s procedures.

Snyder experienced Paul’s world of free market health care, a peculiar system that distinguishes the United States as the only Western country that does not provide basic care to its citizens. A look back at the charity effort launched to save Snyder’s life reveals a grim failure. Despite Paul’s insistence that charity is the appropriate response to America’s uninsured crisis, Snyder’s friends raised $34,870.53, far short of the $400,000 necessary to pay off his bills. View a screen shot below (click to enlarge):

Politically correct news outlets covering health policy issues refuse to note that the far right and corporate lobbying effort to repeal health reform would restore America’s system where 45,000 Americans die every year because of lack of health coverage. Although CNN scorned politicians in previous years for suggesting that health reform saves lives, Blitzer’s question to Paul has actually forced a discussion of how politics affects every day lives, interrupting an otherwise vapid discussion of horse race presidential reporting.

Snyder played a leading hand in developing the “Tea Party” and “money bomb” fundraising efforts for the Paul campaign, a strategy that helped the candidate break small donor fundraising records. “It was Kent more than anyone else who encouraged and pushed Ron to run for president,” said Jesse Benton, a Paul spokesman in a Wall Street Journal piece about Snyder’s life.

“The government of course has a lot of mandates, and I know folks don’t like that — mandates kids go to school, mandates they have to have auto insurance if they have an automobile. And my conservative friends say, well we don’t have to have automobiles, well what state do you live in? Of course you have to have automobiles in this nation,” Mitt Romney said on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor last night when asked to defend the individual mandate that’s part of his 2006 health care reform law. Watch it:

The former governor went on to argue that only states have the right to impose such mandates, but recall that conservatives — who supported individual responsibility in health care until President Obama embraced it — had been making the auto insurance analogy in explaining their support for a federal mandate as recently as 2009. Here is Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) making this case in June 2009 on Fox News Sunday:

GRASSLEY: But when it comes to states requiring it for automobile insurance, the principle then ought to lie the same way for health insurance. Because everybody has some health insurance costs, and if you aren’t insured, there’s no free lunch. Somebody else is paying for it….I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates.

Watch it:

Newt Gingrich told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday that uninsured Americans should receive health care coverage through charity organizations and “free clinics,” rather than government-sponsored programs. The former speaker of the House answered Blitzer’s question from Monday’s CNN/Tea Party debate about how the government should treat a 30-year-old uninsured man who needs months of intensive treatment:

GINGRICH: Historically, we had charity. We had places that say, if you are down on your luck, if you failed to be responsible, we will take care of you, but that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to get a private room, that you’re necessarily going to get everything somebody would get who’s been prudent and who has taken care of themselves. [...] Yes, we’re going to make sure they’re taken care of, but they ought to understand that’s charity.

BLITZER: But that money should come from charitable organizations, not from taxpayers? Is that what you’re saying? [...]

GINGRICH: I would prefer to see it come from charitable organizations.

Watch it:

“Historically,” charity care couldn’t meet the needs of uninsured Americans who were priced out of coverage or denied a policy because of a pre-existing condition, requiring government to establish Medicare and Medicaid (and eventually the Children’s Health Insurance Program). In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, forcing hospitals to provide uncompensated care to the uninsured. Today, the number of Americans without coverage continues to grow and 45,000 people die annually because they lack access to needed care. For Gingrich — who had relied on government subsidized coverage throughout his congressional career — to argue that government should outsource the task of keeping Americans healthy to charities (something they simply won’t have the capacity to do given the scope of the problem) is like saying that people should be punished with death if they are unfortunate enough to be poor or too lazy to purchase health care coverage.