Birth control is quickly becoming the new frontier in the Republican war on women’s health as more and more anti-choice activists seek to make prevention of pregnancy impossible and possibly illegal. After the Obama administration accepted an expert panel’s recommendations that health insurance plans cover birth control with no co-pays, conservatives quickly slammed the decision as frivolous “feminist pork” and even a “conspiracy to eradicate the poor.” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) railed against the decision this summer, insisting that free birth control would “prevent a generation” from being born and make America a “dying civilization.”

Today, GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul jumped on the bandwagon. A staunch libertarian, Paul usually goes to extreme lengths to keep government out of people’s lives. But when it comes to women’s bodies, he’s all in. Blasting the birth control decision as a “rigid regulatory overstep,” Paul insisted that President Obama’s decision to ensure greater access to birth control without “careful consideration” of Christian conservatives as outright “mockery“:

“I am deeply troubled by the flippancy with which President Obama recently discussed regulations that are alarming and troublesome for many Americans,” said Rep. Paul (R-Texas). “Not all Americans are comfortable with the Obama administration’s decision to mandate coverage of birth control and morning-after pills, and the considerations of these people, many of them Christian conservatives, are worthy of careful consideration — not mockery.” [...]

“Many, like me, view this rigid regulatory overstep from which there is inadequate opportunity to self-exempt as payback to Planned Parenthood and big pharmaceutical companies for their support of Obamacare,” Paul said. “Many others oppose it out of strict moral conviction, and their voices should be heard at least to the extent that an authentic opportunity to exempt be provided.”

Of course, the fact that more young Christians are actually having pre-marital sex might make the administration’s decision more appealing to faithful women hoping to avoid pregnancy until marriage.

Deaf to reality, Paul went on and promised, as president, “to defund Obamacare and all federal programs that use tax money taken from the American people to promote abortion and provide abortion services domestically and globally.” “I pledge also to veto any bill with funding for Planned Parenthood or any other international family planning regimes,” he added.

The fact that Paul has wrapped an anti-birth control stance into his presidential platform is not surprising given the in-roads right-wing activists are making with extremely radical anti-abortion legislation. About 1,000 anti-choice bills are being pushed through legislatures across the country, including a number of “personhood” bills that, by redefining life at the moment of fertilization, “turn common forms of birth control into the legal equivalent of a homicide.” House Republicans’ new draft budget not only slashes the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, it eliminates Title X Family Planning funding altogether.

Defending her the panel’s recommendation Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said, “We’ve come a long way in women’s health over the last few decades, but we are in a war” for health services. Republicans “don’t just want to go after the last 18 months,” she added. “They want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive healthcare in America.”

Roll Call reports that a new group called “Partnership for America” has announced a $3 million campaign to repeal health reform. The stated goal is to “‘freeze, investigate and replace’ the health care law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

The website for the group describes itself as a “grassroots” uprising to “ensure a new era of American greatness.” But an examination of the group’s backers reveals more of the same: health care industry consultants using a front group with a lofty name to accomplish a corporate lobbying goal.

Kaiser Health News reports that the team behind the Partnership for America includes former Republican bureaucrats-turned-industry lobbyists Bob Wood, James Capretta, James Wootton and Chuck Cooper. The leadership biography page on the Partnership for America website lists the men involved, but makes significant omissions about their current lobbying clients that stand to benefit from the group’s irresponsible repeal campaign:

– Partnership for America leader Bob Wood is a lobbyist whose portfolio of clients include Eli Lilly, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (better known simply as PhRMA, a lobbying association for drugmakers), Select Medical, and XL Health Corp, a Medicare Advantage provider.

– Partnership for America leader James Capretta is no longer a registered lobbyist, but is currently listed as a “Principle” at a government affairs firm that represents health insurers like CIGNA, UnitedHealth, and America’s Health Insurance Plans (a trade association for the entire health insurance industry).

Other Partnership for America leaders, like James Wootton and Chuck Cooper, have a history of working for health care industry-related interests. Wootton was a former lobbyist for and an official at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association with a sordid past of secretly funneling health insurance cash into far right anti-patient and anti-health reform causes. Cooper is an attorney at a law/lobbying firm with an active health care practice that has counted PhRMA as a client in the past.

Fronts like the Partnership for America thrive when media outlets report on them as bonafide citizens groups. It doesn’t appear that there is anything authentic about the organization. Even the office location listed for the group is actually an anonymous mailbox/corporate conference room service two blocks from K Street.

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) is encouraging the super committee to reduce the national deficit by eliminating access to health care for lower-income families and significantly increasing costs for families earning between $29,000 and $44,000 a year. In a letter to the committee, Rehberg singles out the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of the Medicaid program and “the creation of health insurance premium subsidies” as a “the quickest, clearest and most common sense path to meeting the Committee’s goal”:

Congress should not proceed to implement new, incredibly expensive entailment programs at a time when our Country’s credit rating has been downgraded, we are threatened with another downgrade, we are trying to save the entitlement programs already in place, we are going bankrupt, and we continue to receive warnings from every quarter that our current path is unsustainable.

American families know this. To use a simple analogy, they know that if they are deeply in debt and cannot afford to pay the loans on their home and car, they should not buy an expensive vacation home.”

Of course, the problem with Rehberg’s analogy is that the “an expansive vacation home” — the Congressman’s crude description for life-saving health care services — is fully paid for and even reduces the deficit over a 10-year period. The letter cites a series of media reports that try to contradict this analysis, despite the CBO’s continued insistence to the contrary.

But what’s truly shocking about Rehberg’s letter is his belief that increasing access to insurance for the poorest families is tantamount to splurging on an unnecessary luxury item. Since his own health care is subsidized by the government, perhaps he no longer appreciates that health care is actually a basic necessity that too many Americans are dying without.

Worried that red-state governors are standing in the way of business opportunities, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association is “teaching its member plans how to overcome conservative opposition to the Democrats’ health care law,” Politico’s Kate Nocera reports:

At a closed-door meeting Wednesday at D.C.’s Grand Hyatt with member plans from across the country, association officials covered topics like “Moving exchanges forward,” “What motivates conservatives to oppose creating exchanges? Myths vs. facts,” and “Tactics and strategies,” according to a meeting agenda. The group heard from Mississippi Department of Insurance Senior Attorney Aaron Sisk during lunch.

According to multiple people who attended the meeting, there was a focus on what Blues plans could do to counter “hard-core conservatives” who are refusing to set up exchanges. There was an emphasis on working with coalitions at the grass-roots level to engage both the business community and constituents to help influence legislatures.

“The idea was really to go over what has worked so far in red states,” one meeting attendee said. “It was important to hear from Mississippi, a very, very red state that is using their high risk pool as a way to follow the law.”

Insurers have generally accepted the inevitability of the Affordable Care Act and have worked to shape its implementation to meet their needs. For instance, health lobbyists are pressuring Congress to repeal taxes on the industry, while urging the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt exchange regulations that would allow almost all private insurers to participate in the new marketplaces and provide greater leeway for plans to design the standard essential health benefits package that will be offered in 2014.

At the same time, insurers are preparing for the expansion of new customers. Last month, Cigna — one of the nation’s largest health insurers — kicked off a $25 million ad campaign designed to attract the individual consumers who will begin shopping for their own policies and the industry joined forces with health care and consumer groups to form the “Enroll America” campaign, an effort to “encourage states to make it easy for people to sign up for coverage, by providing model regulations” and “get the word out among the uninsured, through advertising and community outreach.”

Nocera’s article underlines just how crucial the law — and its implementation — is for the insurers’ bottom lines. As one recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded, the health reform’s state-based health care exchanges provide companies with a lucrative new market in which they stand to gain up to $200 billion in revenue by 2019.

President Obama isn’t backing down from a fight over his signature health care law as he gears up for re-election. The president embraced the term “Obamacare” during a fundraiser in St. Louis, Missouri on Tuesday night, proclaiming, “They call it ObamaCare? I do care! You should care, too.” “Some of these folks making central to their campaign pledge to make sure that 30 million people don’t have health insurance. What kind of inspiring message is that,” he asked.

Obama went through some of the benefits of the law, highlighting a provision that will require new insurance plans to cover contraception — and other women’s health care services — without additional out of pocket charges. Partial transcript from the event:

OBAMA: Insurance companies can’t drop your coverage for no good reason. They won’t be able to deny your coverage because of preexisting conditions. Think about what that means for families all across America. Think about what it means for women.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Birth control –

OBAMA: Absolutely. You’re stealing my line. Breast cancer, cervical cancer are no longer preexisting conditions. No longer can insurance companies discriminate against women just because you guys are the ones who have to give birth.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Darn right!

THE PRESIDENT: Darn tooting. They have to cover things like mammograms and contraception as preventive care, no more out-of-pocket costs. And while it will take a couple of years for all the reforms to fully take place, already we’ve got seniors all across the country who have gotten $250 to help them pay for their prescription drug benefit. And nearly 1 million young adults already have health insurance because of it — 1 million more young people. That’s an incredible achievement. The Affordable Care Act is working.

Obama first embraced “Obamacare” during a tour through the midwest in August, saying, “I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obama Cares.’ I do care. If the other side wants to be the folks who don’t care, that’s fine with me.”

A rash of deadly food outbreaks have hit the nation. Salmonella-tainted turkey forced the third-largest recall on record, E. Coli contamination forced the recall of more than 130,000 pounds of ground beef in Ohio, and listeria-tainted fruit caused the country’s deadliest food outbreak in more than a decade. Indeed, the listeria from contaminated cantaloupes have now infected at least 100 people and claimed 18 lives. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that people have died in New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.

And now Iowa joins the list, where a pregnant woman had a miscarriage after contracting listerosis. The Iowa Department of Public Health said the woman, who has since recovered, “had been infected with a strain of listeria monocytogenes that matched the strain detected” in the tainted cantaloupes. According to the CDC, pregnant women are “are about 20 times” more susceptible to listeria and, as evidenced by this woman, “the complications can be quite serious”:

According to the CDC, pregnant women are about 20 times more likely than other healthy adults to get the bacterial infection, and roughly 17 percent of listeriosis cases occur during pregnancy.

“Pregnant women are much more susceptible to having symptoms and becoming severely ill from listeria,” Quinlisk said. “Once they have the infection, the complications can be quite serious.”

The deadly nature of food outbreaks should underscore the necessity for food safety regulations. Indeed, a federal food inspector in California recently prevented a new listeria outbreak in lettuce thanks to an FDA research program. However, House Republicans are blindly waging war on the very same food safety regulations that help prevent such tragedies. This summer, House Republicans slashed $87 million from the Food and Drug Administration and $35 million from the USDA’s food safety and inspection service, arguing that the food industry “self-polices.” GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) railed against regulations on food supply as “overkill” that prevents job creation.

Even now, Republicans continue to block the necessary funds to implement President Obama’s landmark law that provides first significant upgrade to the nation’s food safety system since 1938. This kind of negligence will only result in greater tragedy. As the Department of Health and Human Services notes, one out of six Americans suffers from foodborne illness every year and 3,000 people die from such illnesses each year.

If Republicans want to continue calling itself the “party of life,” their first step should be to stop what they’re doing, and actually work to ensure that Americans — born and unborn — won’t die from what they eat.