This spring, the GOP attempted to cripple family planning by voting to defund Planned Parenthood, but as Jodi Jacobson notes, Republicans were supportive of women’s health programs and family planning long before they denounced it. In May 1972, then-U.N. ambassador George H.W. Bush wrote a letter to “Alan Guttmacher (founder of the Guttmacher Institute) congratulating him on creation of a ‘family planning’ stamp commemorating (gasp!!) Margaret Sanger”:

As a congressman, Bush also advocated that family planning services be available to every woman, calling it a “public health matter.” He championed Title X funding, lobbied President Richard Nixon to enact the program, and described family planning as an effort “that help[s] further work of such worldwide importance, something for which this country can be justly proud.” “We need to make population and family planning household words,” he said in 1969. “We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather are using it as a political steppingstone. If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.”

-Rebecca Leber

During an appearance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa this afternoon, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the Affordable Care Act would “essentially collapse” Medicare and move seniors into “Obamacare.” She reiterated her false claims that Obama “stole” $500 billion from the program and even argued that the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-member cost-cutting commission established by the law — would ration care to Iowans:

BACHMANN: In this Obamacare legislation, the president steals over $500 billion out of Medicare and he pushes it over into Obamacare…. So what the president is planning is to have Medicare essentially collapse and people will move into Obamacare. But that’s not such a good deal, is it? Because we understand there is a brand new board he put in called IPAB — 15 political appointees and they’ll be making the decisions about whether you get your health insurance or not or whether you get your health care or not. They may say you have health insurance — but the question is, will you have access to what you need for your health care?

Watch it:

In reality, the health law extends the life of Medicare trust fund by nine years and the Medicare Trustees estimate growth, not collapse, as close to 64 million Americans will be enrolled in the program by 2020, up from 47 million today. And what about those $500 billion in cuts Bachmann keeps referring to? The law does not reduce the current Medicare budget; it slows the growth in the program by removing $500 billion from future spending over the next 10 years. The cuts will help stabilize Medicare by eliminating overpayments and slowly phasing in payment adjustments that encourage greater efficiency. As a result, the CBO estimates that “growth in spending will be restrained by reductions in updates to payment rates that were included in the 2010 health care legislation.”

The IPAB board is also not nearly as onerous. It’s tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending if costs increase beyond a certain point, but it is statutorily prohibited from rationing benefits or increasing co-pays.

On Friday, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) fired off a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services expressing concern about the conscience protections in a new rule requiring insurers and employers to offer contraception services without additional co-pays. A press release from Toomey’s office admits that the rule does exempt “those religious employers who primarily serve and employ individuals who share their religious tenets,” from offering the services, but argues that “this narrow exemption would prove impossible for Catholic hospitals, universities, colleges, nursing homes and charities given the diverse population that they serve and their workforce.” From the letter:

This regulation requires that a Catholic institution either violate its fundamental beliefs by providing coverage that includes contraception and sterilization or, per the new requirements of PPACA, potentially pay a heavy financial penalty for failing to provide what PPACA deems adequate health coverage to their employees. The myriad of existing regulations generated by PPACA and other federal laws already impair the work of Catholic institutions across Pennsylvania. If this additional federal regulation is imposed as promulgated, it may prompt some Catholic institutions to close their doors, adversely impacting the tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians these entities serve. The aggressive nature of this regulation threatens religious freedom and is unacceptable.

But Catholic universities and organizations already provide contraceptive coverage for their employees — the HHS rule, issued as a result of the Affordable Care Act, simply requires that they offer these services without co-payments or deductibles.

In fact, Catholic Charities has challenged state contraceptive equity laws in both New York and California, but lost “on the basis of a 1990 Supreme Court decision, Employment Division v. Smith, which barred most religion-based exemptions from laws that are neutral, generally applicable and that do not single out religion for special burdens.” The states argued that “the organizations were not being placed in the position of approving birth control, any more than any other employer that provides health coverage is deemed to express ‘approval of every medication or treatment used by the employees.’” The California Supreme Court has also rejected a challenge by Catholic Charities to that state’s similar law.

Last month, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011,” Senate Bill 1467, “to allow health care providers and pharmacists to deny birth control to women if it conflicts with their religious or moral convictions.” An identical bill was also introduced in the House.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared on MSNBC this morning to highlight the government’s anti-bullying and anti-obesity efforts, noting that kids get bullied “because of their size, of their shape, of their color, of their sexual orientation, their religion, how they look.” “I think what we have to be able to do is have parents and adults and community leaders teach kids about tolerance — celebrate the notion that we’re not all the same and that makes America a bigger and stronger country,” she said.

Sebelius also strongly condemned cyberbullying, which she described as “pretty invisible” and “even a scarier atmosphere for kids to be in.” “The problem is getting worse in that regard, there there are now ways can go after kids and never be seen by anybody,” she added. Watch it:

The New York Times’ Dorothy Samuels offers this new map on states’ growing efforts to restrict access to abortion services. States with the darkest shade “have enacted five of the most harmful restrictions: mandatory waiting periods; demeaning “counseling” sessions lacking a real medical justification; parental consent or notification laws that pose a particular hardship for teenagers from troubled homes, including incest victims; needlessly onerous clinic “safety” rules governing such things as the width of hallways and the amount of storage space for janitorial supplies; and prohibitions on abortion coverage in insurance policies. States in lighter shades have fewer of these restrictions. Twenty-seven states have enacted three or more of these laws, while only 12 states, shown in white, have none”:

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2011, states enacted at least 61 abortion restrictions, more than double the previous record of 28 abortion restrictions in 1997:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) blames the federal government’s inflexibility in granting Medicaid waiver for his state’s high uninsured rate and boasts that the Lone Star State still has the best health care system in the world. “The fact is, people continue to move to the state of Texas, some of the highest rates in the country because we’ve created a state where opportunity is very much the word of the day there, if you will, for finding work and what have you,” he said during the GOP presidential debate on Thursday. “Our health care is part of that. Our education is part of that. We are proud of what we put together in the state of Texas.”

But as the Tracy Jan details in today’s Boston Globe, many working Texans who don’t have an offer of employer based insurance or qualify for Medicaid, are falling through the gaps of the state’s patchwork health care system, relying on a complex web of community health care centers and charity care for basic health care services. The results are often deadly:

Dr. Katherine Yudeh King, a pediatrician at Ben Taub General Hospital, which serves a large uninsured population, said one of her patients, a 15-month-old boy, died from dehydration due to diarrhea because his family brought him to the hospital too late, assuming they could not afford care.

“This is the type of thing that happens in Somalia and other developing nations, not something that should happen in Houston,’’ said King, one of the founding members of Doctors for Change, a group that advocates for universal health care in Harris County.

Bellow are nine other indicators of the state’s dilapidated health care system:

1) Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the country – 24.6 percent – and the number of uninsured that has grown by 35 percent during Governor Rick Perry’s 11-year tenure.

2) Overall health care quality for Texas is poorer than in every other state, especially when it comes to preventive, acute, and chronic care, as well as care for diabetes.

3) Texas places 39th among the states in the percentage of adults over 50 who receive recommended screenings such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

4) A fifth of Texas’ pregnant women receive no prenatal care in their first trimester.

5) 16.8 percent of children are uninsured, more than all but one other state, and only half of Texas children have a medical provider who knows them and coordinates their care. More than a third of them have not received recommended medical and preventive care within the year, and immunization rates are low as well.

6) Texas also ranks last in the country in the percent of children who receive needed mental health care.

7) The state cut two-thirds of the funding for women’s health clinics and underfunded Medicaid by almost $4 billion, in addition to cutting hospital reimbursements.

8) Perry vetoed a bill in 2001 that would have expanded Medicaid services and added cancer screenings such as Pap smears to women’s health services. In 2003, Texas tightened the eligibility requirements for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and as a result, 237,000 children were kicked off its rolls, said Garnet Coleman, a Democratic state representative from Houston who has served in the Texas Legislature for 20 years and is a member of the House Public Health Committee.