This afternoon, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) backed a state’s right to enact the individual health insurance mandate at a press conference endorsing Mitt Romney’s candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, but argued that comparisons between Romneycare and Obamacare are “intellectually dishonest.” “Each governor should have an opportunity to make a decision about what works best for their states,” Christie explained. “But I would tell you this, any attempt to compare what happened in Massachusetts and what the President has done to the United States of America with his plan is completely intellectually dishonest”:

CHRISTIE: Governor Romney did not raise one tax in doing what he did to try to improve the health care system in Massachusetts. And I will tell you, that I’m proud of him for standing for doing what he thinks is right. That may not have been right for New Jersey, it may not be right for Montana, it may not be right for California. Those governors will make those decisions. But do not try to equate what’s happened with Obamacare with what Governor Romney did in Massachusetts. The President of the United States is raising taxes to pay for his plan he still won’t pay for. What Governor Romney did was what he thought was responsible as governor of Massachusetts for people to have access to health care.

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Christie’s scolding comes on the same day NBC news reported that advisers and consultants to Romney’s health care plan met with President Obama to help craft the Affordable Care Act and are now advising state governments for how best to implement the law. Asked about the report at today’s press conference, Romney tried to dismiss it by claiming, “I don’t believe they were aides, they were people who were consultants.”

Neither man mentioned that the Massachusetts law is financed with federal funding and higher taxes on individuals who fail to purchase coverage and large businesses that didn’t offer insurance. Romney admitted as much during a March 7, 2010 interview on Fox News Sunday: “If they don’t buy insurance, they’ll find that their taxes are higher,” he said. “The employer mandate is pretty soft. An employer pays — I think it’s $295 a year if an employee doesn’t have insurance that they bought on their own or if they bought through the company.” The state also increased its cigarette tax and continued to rely on a safety net surcharge on insurers and hospitals.

“I’m sure the president got lots of ideas, but the one person he should have talked to, that he never talked to, was me,” Romney said today in response to his advisers being consulted. It’s an odd piece of criticism from a man who credits himself for making efficient business decisions. After all, even he can appreciate why the White House bypassed him to talk to the people who actually wrote his plan: the administration was interested in the policy mechanics of reform, not stories of how Romney built public support for the mandate in Massachusetts and spearhead the measure through the state legislature.

A grim report from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that health disparities across race, ethnicity and income remain largely unchanged over a 10-year period. Lower income Americans and minorities continued to lag behind in access to basic health care in 2008 as the nation remained far behind its targets for expanding access, the study found:

In eight years of the Bush administration, the country fell short of its health care targets and underserved population experienced few gains in overcoming health care disparities. Read the full report here.

– Rebecca Leber

Several prominent Republicans have proposed replacing the Affordable Care Act with a “market based” health care solution that replaces the employer tax subsidy for health care coverage with tax credits that would allow families and individuals to purchase health insurance coverage on the individual market. But during a speech at the Heritage Foundation this afternoon, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — who is running for re-election — strongly came out against the idea, arguing that such a proposal would “disrupt this whole country.” Hatch warned the deficit super committee against the plan:

HATCH: Insofar as the tax code subsidizes health care, I think it would be a mistak to address any of the tax expenditures for health care as part of a deficit reduction exercise. There might be cause to reevaluate health care tax expenditures in the context of a rate lowering exercise in tax reform, but we should not be undercutting middle class tax benefits to pay for President Obama’s outsized and hopefully temporary welfare state. [...]

And since they have a difficult time straightforward increasing taxes, they’ll be looking for tax expenditures. What are tax expenditures? Well, let me give you the most important one — the most costly one. And that is, corporate provision of tax free health care to its employees. Or at least tax free to the corporation. Now, if you canceled that, you might save upwards of $250 to $300 billion over 10 years, but you’d sure disrupt this whole country.

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Eliminating the tax deduction for employer-provided benefits was part of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) presidential health care plan and was most recently reintroduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). But as Hatch suggests, far from creating more “choice” and competition in health care, such an approach would entice young healthy workers to buy cheaper but less substantive insurance in the individual insurance plan market place and increase costs for sicker workers, pricing many out of coverage altogether.

Mitt Romney refused to commit to funding to the U.S. Global AIDS initiative during a town hall in New Hampshire on Monday and suggested that HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment may take a back seat to his goal of reducing deficit spending. Romney was asked about his approach three separate times during the event, but seemed unaware of the issue and stopped short of laying out a comprehensive approach:

ROMNEY: I will commit to look at that issue, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how we’re going to spend money on a federal level, budget by budget item. [...]

The answer is, I’m not going to commit to its funding level at that level, because I haven’t evaluated in the context of the entire budget and what our priorities would be, but I can say this, which is, at a time when we are borrowing money to pay for things…I’m very reluctant to borrow lots more money to be able to do wonderful things, if those things can be done by people making charitable contributions or if other countries that are wealthy…

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President George W. Bush established the U.S. Global AIDS initiative — and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which represents the largest component of the initiative — in 2003, in an effort to connect the poorer people of the world with HIV/AIDS treatment. From 2003 to 2008, Congress committed $18.8 billion to PEPFAR, exceeding the original $15 billion first pledged, and appropriated another $48 billion over a five-year period. President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget included almost $7 billion for PEPFAR, representing a 1.8 percent increase on the previous year. The program is supporting treatment for millions of people around the world and has averted “240,000 infant infections” in its first five years.

At the town hall, Romney tried to obscure his unfamiliarity with the issue by claiming that he isn’t prepared to set budget goals for any of his initiatives. But Romney is more than happy to set targets for defense spending, which he has pledged to increase from “about 3.8 percent of the GDP” to “about 4 percent” if elected president.

Mitt Romney responds to Democrats’ claims that President Obama modeled the Affordable Care Act on his 2006 Massachusetts health reform law, by asking why the president didn’t call him for advice. Today, Michael Isikoff reports that the administration did something much more useful — it consulted Romney’s closest advisers, holding “a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006″:

The records, gleaned from White House visitor logs reviewed by NBC News, show that senior White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three health-care advisers and experts who helped shape the health care reform law signed by Romney in 2006, when the Republican presidential candidate was governor of Massachusetts. One of those meetings, on July 20, 2009, was in the Oval Office and presided over by President Barack Obama, the records show.

“The White House wanted to lean a lot on what we’d done in Massachusetts,” said Jon Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney administration on health care and who attended five meetings at the Obama White House in 2009, including the meeting with the president. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.” [...]

Romney is “the father of health-care reform,” said Gruber. “I think he is the single person most responsible for health care reform in the United States. … I’m not trying to make a political position or a political statement, I honestly feel that way. If Mitt Romney had not stood up for this reform in Massachusetts … I don’t think it would have happened nationally. So I think he really is the guy with whom it all starts.”

After reform became law, Obama repeatedly credited Romney for the idea, telling the Today show in March of 2010, “[W]hen you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts. A lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market.” Obama resisted the individual mandate as a candidate, but endorsed the provision at the urging of former Director of the White House Office of Health Care Reform Nancy-Anne DeParle, who argued that “Obama should embrace a plan much like that in Massachusetts, driven by the teeth of a mandate,” Ron Suskind writes in his new book Confidence Men.

And while the Affordable Care Act borrows substantially from the Massachusetts reform — it establishes the mandate and the exchanges, for instance — the federal law includes cost containment provisions that the Massachusetts measure lacks. Below is a comparison:

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives is preparing to pass a bill that would require women to view an ultrasound 24 hours before undergoing an abortion. The measure, which has attracted 112 sponsors (enough for passage), establishes rigid guidelines for physicians and ultrasound operators that are designed to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure, although “exceptions are provided in the cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies and for fetuses that are less than eight weeks along.”

Supporters of abortion rights are already speaking out against the measure. “I’m shocked at the people whose names are on this,” state Rep. Babette Josephs (D) told Philly Now. “They assume—all of them—that women are either childish, frivolous, brainless, stupid or evil.” Indeed, ultrasound operators are required to:

Inform the patient of her right to observe the fetal heartbeat and, if she exercises that right, make observable the live real-time heartbeat, when present, for the patient to observe. If the auscultation is performed, the patient must also be informed of her right to hear the fetal heartbeat, when present, in live real time.

Position the screen so that the patient is able to view the ultrasound test in its entirety, with a view of her unborn child, while that test is being conducted to determine gestational age. The patient is not required to view the screen.

Provide two prints, in separate sealed envelopes, of the ultrasound image to be used to accurately determine gestational age. One print shall be provided to the patient, and one print shall be provided to the physician who is to perform the abortion.

Physicians performing the abortion will have to “Inform the patient of the probable gestational age of the unborn child” and “Offer the patient an opportunity to view an ultrasound video” if the abortion is performed within 14 days of the ultrasound. The bill would also empower the attorney general to seek an injunction to shut down providers who fail to comply with the detailed ultrasound requirements and record keeping provisions. Both physicians and ultrasound operators must submit annual reports indicating the “gestational age of the unborn child” and whether the patient declined to view the ultrasound. According to the Guttmacher Institute, six states already mandate “that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound on each woman seeking an abortion, and require the provider to offer the woman the opportunity to view the image.”