Two bioethicist professors are betting more than $10,000 that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) cannot produce a victim who suffered “mental retardation” from the HPV vaccine. University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles first challenged the Bachmann campaign, offering $1,000 for medical proof of Bachmann’s mysterious victim. Director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics Art Caplan raised the stakes by putting an additional $10,000 on the line:

If she can produce a case in one week starting today verified by three medical experts that she and I pick of a woman who became ‘retarded’ (her words) due to HPV vaccine I will donate that [$10,000] to a charity of her choice. She must donate 10k to a charity I pick if she fails to do so.

Miles’ reason for challenging Bachmann is because he said messages like hers can “do enormous public health harm.” The Bachmann campaign has ignored both challenges.

Bachmann raised a storm of anger and skepticism from the medical community when she told Fox News on Monday night about a woman who claimed the Gardasil vaccine for HPV led to brain damage in her daughter. Medical experts have unanimously discredited Bachmann’s story, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

– Rebecca Leber

Yesterday, ThinkProgress brought you the tragic story of Kent Snyder, Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-TX) 2008 presidential campaign manager. Snyder, who was the person that convinced Paul to run for the White House, died that same year at 49 from pneumonia because he lacked health insurance. His story is getting renewed attention in light of Paul’s exchange with moderator Wolf Blitzer at CNN’s debate Monday night, in which he was asked what should happen to a comatose 30-year-old man who lacked insurance — someone similar to Snyder. When Blizter asked if the hypothetical patient should be left to die, some members of the audience yelled “yes!”

Now, CNN reports that Snyder lacked insurance because he had a pre-existing medical condition, which “made it impossible for him to find coverage.” Watch the segment from last night’s Situation Room:

There are an estimated 50 to 129 million Americans who, like Snyder, have medical conditions that lead to higher health insurance costs or an inability to find any coverage at all. sSolving this problem is one of the core goals of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

By 2014, the law will forbid insurers from charging sick patients more or rejecting them out of hand, a move that is only possible when coupled with the individual health insurance mandate conservatives despise. But even before 2014, Snyder could potentially have been eligible for a federal high-risk insurance pool for people with pre-existing conditions, which was established last year.

People like Snyder, who cannot find affordable insurance, are exactly who the law is intended to help. Even people who hate the law, like Paul — who has said “Obamacare” is “monstrous” and “bad for your health” — may find themselves thankful for it down the road.

Forty-eight national and state consumer advocacy organizations have released a letter condemning the GOP’s recent legislation to repeal “the medical loss ratio provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and prohibit, in perpetuity, the enforcement of other important consumer insurance protections.”

Both measures are going to be debated during Thursday’s Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing. Responding to the draft bill eliminating the “grandfather regulations” that allow health plans in existence before the law went into effect to avoid abiding by health reform’s benefits standards and consumer protections — so long as employers or individual policies don’t significantly change their policies — the groups write:

This draft legislation wipes out these safeguards, taking away the new protections consumers have recently earned and those they stand to gain in the future. This would impose higher costs for preventive care and reinstate lifetime limits on benefits. It would allow exclusions of coverage for pre-existing conditions in perpetuity, locking in disparate treatment of millions of people. It would increase the number of uninsured by taking away the coverage of many young adults who are newly insured through their parents’ health plans. Just this week, the Census reported insurance gains for about 500,000 young adults, due in large part to this provision.

ThinkProgress filed this report from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The most distasteful moment in Monday’s Republican presidential debate was when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked whether a 30 year old who gets in a catastrophic accident should be allowed to die if he doesn’t have health insurance and the Tea Party audience cheered in approval, shouting “yes!”

Following the debate, many commentators were taken aback by the death cheer, especially from a party that regularly touts its “Christian values.”

Yesterday, ThinkProgress discussed the matter with a number of students at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia. The students were unanimous in their disapproval, calling it “un-Christian” to simply allow a person to die because they were uninsured. Unlike the cheering Tea Party audience, Liberty students we spoke with said the “Christian thing to do” would be to provide care to those in need, regardless of their personal situation.

The disturbing incident in Monday’s debate was actually the second time in as many weeks that Republican debate attendees have applauded death. During the California debate last week, the audience cheered the fact that 234 people have been executed under Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) watch in Texas.

Though the Republican Party that used to say it represented “compassionate conservatism,” their base has taken an ugly turn of late. For many Christian conservatives, the idea of cheering anybody’s death may finally be a bridge too far.

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Average Medicare Advantage premiums will decrease by 4 percent in 2012 and enrollment in the program will grow by 10 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced today, undermining Republican claims that reductions in government payments to private insurers will devastate the program. Plan enrollment is “the highest overall enrollment of beneficiaries as a percent,” CMS Deputy Administrator and Director Jonathan Blum said, predicting continued growth into the future. Just one percent of beneficiaries will have to enroll in a new plan because their existing policies are no longer available.

Throughout the health reform debate, however, Republicans argued that lowering the subsidy to private insurers participating in Medicare Advantage — the Affordable Care Act eliminates $145 million over 10 years from the program — would force companies to stop offering coverage, causing 10 million seniors to lose their Medicare benefits. Republicans introduced numerous amendments instructing Congress to remove the cuts to the Medicare Advantage program and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) even urged seniors to rip up their AARP cards in protest of the organization’s support for the reductions.

Executives from firms that participate in Advantage recently told the Kaiser Family Foundation that even with the cuts, “the amount of money that flows to Medicare plans is significant. A single Medicare enrollee draws about $910 a month for private plans, according to Barlcays Capital analyst Joshua Raskin. Plans expect to earn about $41 a month per member, after paying medical expenses. That’s more than double the average earnings from commercially insured members, according to Raskin’s analysis.” The analyst said “he expects plans to continue to remain profitable and grow, despite the cuts, albeit more slowly than they would have without the health law.”

The enrollment figures also exceed projections by the Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare Trustees, both of which predicted that 2012 enrollment would only increase to 10.2 million and 12.1 million respectively.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) veered off GOP’s “repeal and replace” talking points yesterday during an appearance with CMS administrator Don Berwick in Nashville, Tennessee, suggesting that the next challenge in health care policy is not rolling back the Affordable Care Act, but implementing it:

FRIST: You know, we’ve seen Medicare, we’ve seen Medicaid, we’ve seen the most recent reform — the Affordable Care Act. I think what we’re going to see now is no more legislation but a demand for implementation of all these in an improved modernized way through partnerships and I’m very hopeful, based on both the most recent legislation but also the incentives of the system, that all of that centers on value that is quality and outcomes and results for dollar invested… it will be a partnership between the public sector, the private sector, and the government.

Watch it:

At the forum, Frist also reiterated his belief that the Affordable Care Act would survive legal challenges, even if the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The senator had supported the individual mandate back in 2009, when, in an op-ed for U.S. News and World Report, he wrote, “It is time for an individual health insurance mandate for a minimum level of health coverage.” “It is a conservative approach that would affordably achieve necessary goals,” he added. In April 2010, Frist also gave an “A” grade to the provisions in the law aimed at expanding insurance to an additional 32 million people, but argued that the administration could have done more to control spending.

Despite new Census data showing that a growing number of Americans are losing their private health insurance coverage and becoming uninsured, Republicans are expected to introduce legislation at this morning’s hearing of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee that would prevent insurance plans in existence before the Affordable Care Act from making drastic benefit cuts or other policy changes, effectively gutting consumer protections for millions of Americans with private coverage. The panel will also consider H.R. 2077, a bill to repeal medical loss ratio (MLR) regulations that require plans that don’t spend 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on health care costs to issue rebates to their enrollees.

The health law exempts health plans in existence before the law went into effect from its benefits standards and consumer protections — so long as employers or individual policies don’t significantly change their benefits or increase costs. Republicans argue that employers would eventually lose this protection and “face steep penalties, increasing their costs and negatively affecting wages and job growth” and so they’ve offered a bill that would completely eliminate the trigger for grandfather status. Employers or individual policies would be able to skirt the new consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act while significantly shrinking benefits package or increasing deductibles.

The GOP measure would prohibit the enforcement forever into the future of any requirement or regulation related to existing health policies. Plans that existed before March 23, 2010 would never have to offer the following consumer protections:

– Extend dependent coverage to young adults up to age 26

– Stop denying coverage for pre-existing conditions

– Stop setting lifetime limits for policies

– End annual limits (restricted limits now, all annual limits in 2014)

– End rescissions of coverage

– Abide by the medical loss ratio provision — spending 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on health care.

The Obama administration has sought to work with employers and plans to keep disruptions to a minimum. For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services loosened the grandfather regulations on Nov. 15, 2010, updating the rules to allow more employers and policies to keep their grandfather status. But unlike the GOP, Democrats wouldn’t want plans to be exempt forever — and that’s a good thing. The whole point of grandfather rules is to serve as a bridge to gradually move everyone into plans that are required to meet a basic floor of standards, ensuring that everyone will eventually have access to the law’s new consumer protections.

The GOP’s bill to undermine the MLR regulations would similarly deny benefits to beneficiaries. The Obama administration estimates that as many as 9 million people will qualify for rebates totaling between $600 million and $1.4 billion in 2011, and between $2 billion and $4.9 billion for 2011-2013. In fact, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey concluded that insurers are already “considering reducing premiums in 2012 partly in response to the PPACA MLR requirements.” State insurance regulators told the GAO that some companies “have not applied for premium increases and are making adjustments to lower premiums as a strategy to increase their MLRs.”