ThinkProgress has been reporting on the disturbing campaign by radical anti-abortion groups to pass “personhood” amendments to state constitutions that would define life as beginning the moment an egg is fertilized. These laws would not only criminalize abortion, but outlaw common forms of contraception as well.

Now the Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg reports on another consequence of this supposedly “pro-life” measure: it could ban couples from conceiving children through in vitro fertilization (IVF):

In September, Mississippi’s Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution to define embryos as persons could go forward in November. Since then, Dr. Randall Hines, one of four physicians in the state who perform in vitro fertilization, has been fielding panicked calls from women with fertility problems. “We have patients calling us who are extremely anxious,” he says. “If they are contemplating IVF, they’re asking, ‘Do I need to go ahead and do it right now, before this becomes law?’” [...]

The so-called Personhood Amendment won’t outlaw all IVF, but it could drastically change how it’s practiced, making it less effective and more dangerous. “It’s certainly possible that certain IVF practices would become illegal,” says Hines. “It could alter the way an individual patient and physician would interact. Quite honestly nobody knows what would happen, because this is uncharted territory.

Hines has been trying to reassure his patients, but also tells them that getting started on IVF treatments before Mississippi voters decide on Amendment 26 “wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Surprising as it may seem that “pro-life” activists would want to stop couples who desperately want children from conceiving, Goldberg notes that it’s no coincidence that personhood laws would prohibit IVF. Keith Mason, the 30-year-old president of Personhood USA, acknowledges that should these initiatives pass, “it would ban some current practices of IVF.” He explains his disapproval of the IVF process: “The creation of 30 or 60 embryos and then picking through them to see which ones are most likely boys or girls, or basically looking at the ones you want to give life to and destroying the rest.”

Mason has also been transparent about his desire to have personhood laws ban birth control as well. “Certainly women, my wife included, would want to know if the pills they’re taking would kill a unique human individual,” he told NPR.

Although IVF has long been a safe and accepted practice for helping couples struggling with infertility to get pregnant, religious extremists have condemned it for allowing doctors to “play God.” Ironically, the personhood movement that claims to want to stop the “destruction of life” actually wants to prevent it from being created. Around 58,000 American IVF babies are born each year, comprising more than 1 percent of all births in the U.S.

Politico’s Pulse flagged this story, from the Indianapolis Business Journal, of WellPoint chief financial officer Wayne DeVeydt complaining that the penalty for not obtaining health care coverage may be set too low in the Affordable Care Act. (Those without coverage pay a tax penalty of the greater of $695 per year up to a maximum of three times that amount — $2,085 — per family or 2.5% of household income ):

Until fines get a lot closer to the price of health insurance, DeVeydt said, many people won’t buy coverage—especially the young and healthy, whose unused premiums offset the high cost of care for older patients. “Would you ever feed the meter if feeding the meter costs more than the [parking] ticket?” DeVeydt said in another analogy. “People say that’s not going happen. It is going to happen.”

Still, DeVeydt said the individual mandate is necessary to achieve a goal of universal health insurance.

Only time will tell if people would rather pay the penalty or buy the insurance, but the experience in Massachusetts (where the overwhelming majority of residents are now insured even though the maximum penalty in actually substantially below the federal amount!) and economic research suggests that most are likely to opt for the coverage. In fact, a recent survey of the uninsured found that an overwhelming majority — 76 percent of the uninsured — would rather comply with the individual mandate than pay the penalty for forgoing it.

In fact, instead of complaining about insufficient penalties, health insurers have a critical role to play in partnering with the government and nonprofits to educate the public about the mandate and the new choices of coverage, and I suspect that the extent of that outreach will have a much greater affect on coverage rates than any level of mandate penalty.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that budgetary spending on health care would rise significantly in the long run if Obamacare were repealed. The law contains several cost-containing mechanisms — the excise tax on high cost plans and the Medicare savings — that would “slow the growth in federal health care spending over the long term,” the report found. As a result, it reduces entitlement spending from 14.5 percent of GDP to 13.5 percent by 2030 and stabilizes spending thereafter:

As the second chart shows, entitlement costs increase substantially beyond 2030 if the law is repealed:

Medicaid, which is funded jointly by the states and the federal government, provides health coverage to approximately 53 million lower income Americans. The federal government matches state spending on a per-claim basis and pays a percentage of each state’s Medicaid costs (anywhere between 50 and 75 percent). Conservatives like House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and the GOP presidential contenders have proposed reducing the federal government’s commitment to the program by block granting Medicaid and paying states pre-established grants that may not reflect actual costs. The reduction in federal spending would require states to either appropriate additional funding towards Medicaid or lower program expenditures by cutting provider payment rates, limiting eligibility, and reducing benefits, the CBO has concluded.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) has endorsed Ryan’s block grant proposal, and yesterday, during a radio interview with Sean Hannity, he revealed that his cuts to Medicaid could be even more draconian than Ryan’s. Ryan already aims to shrink the federal government’s contribution to Medicaid by 35 percent in 2022, converting the existing federal matching rate for each state into a block grant and growing the grant by approximately 3 percent annually (as compared to the estimated 6.5 percent to 7 percent annual growth* in federal expenditures that would occur under current law). Romney told Hannity that he would grow his Medicaid block grants by just 1 to 2 percent per year:

ROMNEY: It’s mathematically pretty straight forward how you hold down costs, which is you say, we’re going to cut it by a certain amount and then comes the hard work of saying where you’re going to cut it. And that why I’ve laid out a plan that balances our budget…taking Medicaid and giving it back to the states and growing it only 1 to 2 percent a year.

Listen:

Comparatively, Romney’s reductions would result in even steeper cuts that would affect tens of millions of low-income Medicaid beneficiaries — seniors in nursing homes, people with disabilities, children — for whom the program has become a critical source of coverage. A very rough back-of-the envelope calculation using the CBO’s projected federal Medicaid expenditures for 2012 as a baseline (and then growing that number by 1.5 percent annually through 2021) demonstrates the sheer magnitude of Rommey’s cuts as compared to current law and Ryan’s plan. The results show that Romney could reduce the size of the program by more than 40 percent over that period:

* Via Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), this percentage normalizes the growth rate to take out the effects of 2014.