During an appearance on WBUR’s On Point this morning, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) celebrated the demise of CLASS, the Affordable Care Act’s long-term care insurance program, and boasted that he is “one of the 7 million” Americans enrolled in a private long-term insurance program. But as Howard Gleckman, a resident fellow at the Urban Institute, pointed out, very few individuals can afford long-term policies and often deplete their personal savings in order to qualify for coverage available through Medicaid. “Congressman Burgess bought a long-term care insurance policy,” Gleckman observed. “With all respect, he’s a physician. His income was probably quite a bit higher than the average American. Long-term insurance premiums are about $2,000 a year. Most people can’t afford it.”

“This is just something that you budget for,” Burgress responded and claimed that the government can encourage the purchase of private long-term care insurance through tax credits. He also speculated that “the same type of premium would have been paid by people in the CLASS.” “The loss of this does not trouble me at all,” he added.

But when a listener from Massachusetts highlighted the inadequacy of the private market — an insurance company increased his premiums by 70 percent — Burgess appeared caught off guard. He reiterated his claim that CLASS was unsustainable and urged listeners to purchase private health insurance sooner. Listen to the exchange:

Judy Feder, a former senior fellow at CAP who is now with the Urban Institute, also added that private insurers were already abandoning the long-term care market and characterized Burgess’ tax credit solution as “support for the rich.” “The tax benefit benefits the high income population and is likely simply to replace some of the dollars that better-off people are is already paying in premiums,” Feder explained. “What a government program, even a limited one offers, is an opportunity to put government behind an education, a marketing effort. It can actually support the purchase of private long-term care insurance alongside a modest public benefit,” she said.

Feder expressed frustration with the government’s decision to bandon CLASS and argued that the Affordable Care Act provided HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius with sufficient flexibility to ensure that the program can remain sustainable over the next 75 years. Gleckman suggested that administration lawyers seemed overly concerned that some of the Secretary’s authority could be challenged in court. Listen to the whole program here.

Instead of focusing on job creation, congressional Republicans have spent their time passing socially conservative legislation like the “Let Women Die” bill that would allow hospitals that receive federal funds to deny women life-saving abortion procedures.

Now Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), one of the most die-hard anti-choice lawmakers, has jumped on the bandwagon by sneaking a radical anti-abortion amendment onto a completely unrelated piece of legislation. DeMint’s amendment would ban women and their doctors from discussing abortion over the Internet:

Anti-choice Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) just filed an anti-choice amendment to a bill related to agriculture, transportation, housing, and other programs. The DeMint amendment could bar discussion of abortion over the Internet and through videoconferencing, even if a woman’s health is at risk and if this kind of communication with her doctor is her best option to receive care.

Under this amendment, women would need a separate, segregated Internet just for talking about abortion care with their doctors.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said DeMint is essentially mandating “an abortion-only version of Skype.” She points out that a woman with high-risk pregnancy talking to her doctor through video conferencing would have to somehow switch to a separate communications system if abortion came up at all. “It is impractical, ridiculous, and, most importantly, bad for women in rural or remote areas who would not be able to discuss the full set of options with their doctor,” Keenan said.

DeMint’s bill is yet another Republican attempt to circumvent women’s constitutional right to an abortion by essentially outlawing doctors from discussing that option with their patients. These so-called “small government” conservatives have no problem inserting government into private conversations between women and their doctors.

To add insult to injury, DeMint’s underhanded method is to shoehorn this attack on women’s privacy onto an unrelated bill — an insidious effort to push his agenda while avoiding public scrutiny.

Rick Santorum pledged to repeal all federal funding for contraception, during a recent interview with CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart, arguing that birth control devalues the act of procreation. “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”:

SANTORUM: [Sex] is supposed to be within marriage. It’s supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal…but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen…This is special and it needs to be seen as special.

Watch it at 17:48:

An overwhelming majority of Americans — virtually all women (more than 99 percent ) aged 15–44 have used at least one contraceptive method — rely on contraceptives to prevent unintended pregnancies and limit the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. In fact, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that contraceptive services provided at publicly funded clinics helped prevent almost two million unintended pregnancies. Without funding from Medicaid and Title X, “abortions occurring in the United States would be nearly two-thirds higher among women overall and among teens; the number of unintended pregnancies among poor women would nearly double.”

Mitt Romney has praised Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to privatize Medicare for future enrollees as making “important strides in the right direction” and promised that his own proposal “will differ” but “share those objectives.” During a discussion with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review Journal earlier this week, Romney revealed that he would give seniors “vouchers” to enroll in private managed care plans, but preserve the traditional CMS-sponsored coverage as an option:

ROMNEY: You have a program like Paul Ryan has proposed, which says we’re going to give people vouchers to let them choose among private plans. I would not at the same time would want to remove the option for people who have standard Medicare. But I would probably move to a more managed care approach even in Medicare itself.

Watch it:

The proposal is a small tweak to the Ryan approach and will only save the federal government money by shifting costs to seniors rather than lowering national health care spending. Managed care — as it currently exists as an option through Medicare Advantage — lacks the bargaining power of the traditional Medicare program and has produced only limited savings. In fact, private plans are receiving a subsidy from the federal government to offer additional benefits, but are often less efficient and charge more for the same coverage. That means, as the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, “under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.” “[T]he beneficiary’s share in 2030 would be 68 percent under the proposal” but only “25 percent” under current law. Their share will only increase over time, since the “voucher” Romney is proposing will probably not keep up with health care costs.

Romney’s one modification — maintaining traditional Medicare as an option — is significant but also problematic. Analysts who have studied similar plans, argue that younger and healthier beneficiaries would be encouraged to leave the traditional program for managed care, creating a severe adverse selection spiral for seniors who remain in traditional Medicare. Henry Aaron — who developed the concept with Robert Reischauer in 1995 — has since walked away from the proposal, arguing that the Affordable Care Act may push Medicare to use its leverage to create much more substantial savings.

The GOP presidential candidates engaged in a heated six-and-a-half minute exchange about health care reform during Tuesday night’s CNN debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Without offering any original solutions to the health care crisis — save the typical talking points of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in its entirety and allowing individuals and families to purchase coverage in the unregulated individual health insurance market — or explaining how they would deal with the coverage loss and deficit hole that undoing the law would leave behind, the candidates went after each other for supporting elements of President Obama’s health care reform law. So who was wrong and who was right? Below is a video of the GOP’s top six health care myths and the facts that undermine their claims:

– CLAIM 1 FROM SANTORUM TO ROMNEY: “Your plan was the basis for Obamacare. Your consultants helped Obama craft Obamacare.” FACT: Several consultants who worked with Romney also advised President Obama’s health care reform efforts, holding as many as a dozen meetings with White House officials in 2009. Obama initially resisted the individual mandate as a candidate — Romneycare’s central tenet — 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.

- CLAIM 2 FROM ROMNEY: “I was asked, is this something you would have the whole nation do? And I said no. This was something that was crafted in Massachusetts.” FACT: Before running for the presidency in 2008, Romney repeatedly suggested that his plan for expanding coverage should apply to the nation. As he told Newsweek in 2007, “I’m proud of what we’ve done. If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation.” As he wrote in the hardcover version of his book No Apology, “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country, and it can be done without letting the government take over health care.” That sentence was omitted from the paperback edition.

- CLAIM 3 FROM SANTORUM: “The governor of Massachusetts is coming forward saying we have to pick up the job left undone by Romneycare, which is doing something about cutting health care costs. What you did is exactly what Barack Obama did, focused on the wrong problem.” FACT: Unlike the ACA, Romneycare expanded coverage, but did not tackle health care costs. As a result, the Massachusetts legislature is now “producing bills that would make Massachusetts the first state — again — to radically revamp the way doctors, hospitals and other health providers are paid.” As Romney himself admitted, “It’s absolutely right that there’s a lot that needs to be done — and I didn’t get the job done in Massachusetts — and getting the healthcare costs down in this country is something I think we’ve got to do at the national level, and I intend to do that.”

- CLAIM 4 FROM GINGRICH: Romneycare “couldn’t have been done by any other state, because no other state had a Medicaid program as lavish as yours and no other state got as much money from the Bush administration for this experiment.” FACT: Romneycare relied on a waiver from the federal government to finance half of its coverage expansion. Romney said as much last April, when he told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, “Actually, from the beginning the plan was a 50/50 deal between the federal government and the state government. The feds fund half of it, they have from the very beginning.” At the signing ceremony for the law, Romney credited the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) for securing the deal, calling him a “parent” of health care reform.

- CLAIM 5 FROM ROMNEY TO GINGRICH: “Actually Newt, we got the idea of the individual mandate from you…and the Heritage Foundation.” FACT: “I absolutely did work with the Heritage Foundation against Hillarycare,” Gingrich conceded. Several other Republican senators — including Orrin Hatch (UT) and Chuck Grassley (IA) — also supported the individual mandate in an effort to defeat President Bill Clinton’s health care proposal.

- CLAIM 6 FROM BACHMANN: “Even the Obama administration chose to reject part of Obamacare when they tried to throw out the CLASS Act…when even the Obama administration wants to repeal this bill, I think we’re going to win this thing.” FACT: The administration has actually specifically come out against repealing CLASS, and as former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) admitted on Tuesday, the decision not to implement the program does not undermine the law as a whole. If anything, it only reinforces the case for an individual mandate.