States across the country have passed restrictive abortion laws that don’t include exceptions for rape or incest, and in an effort to solidify themselves with social conservatives, Republican candidates are being more vocal about their extreme opposition to abortion in virtually every circumstance.

In Kentucky, where a restrictive abortion bill failed this year, state Senate President and Republican gubernatorial nominee David Williams used an odd analogy to make it clear that he opposed abortions even in cases of rape or incest. In an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal’s editorial board this week, Williams likened such abortions to his hypothetical desire to seek vengeance if someone had shot his mother:

Williams said he opposes abortion even for cases of rape and incest, and he likens it to murder: “If somebody shot my mother, I would want to kill them, but I don’t think that is the appropriate thing to do. We have laws against murder.”

Positions like Williams’ are clearly unconstitutional and create the absurd situation where a woman who has already been a victim of a crime would have no choice or control over her own body. Unfortunately, though, they’re becoming more and more common among conservatives, from state legislatures where Republicans claim women will fake rapes to qualify for abortions to the party’s presidential race, where candidates have advocated sending doctors who perform abortions for rape and incest victims to prison.

Our guest blogger is Topher Spiro, the Managing Director for Health Policy at the Center for American Progress.

News reports out today suggest that Democrats on the Super Committee are proposing $400 billion in cuts to Medicare—$200 billion in cuts to benefits, and $200 billion in cuts to providers. It’s unclear what this means, and whether it’s true, but one thing is certain: there is a better way.

Today the Center for American Progress is releasing a package of reforms to modernize the payment and delivery system. These reforms are a win-win: they will reduce costs and at the same time improve the quality of care and the efficiency of the health care system. Here’s what we propose:

– Immediately expand a Medicare program that bundles payments together for certain procedures nationwide. Then, completely replace fee-for-service with bundled payments for all procedures and primary care by 2016.

– Immediately implement competitive bidding for durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics, and supplies nationwide, and expand the program to include laboratory tests.

– Require electronic eligibility, claims processing, and payment, as well as centralized physician credentialing.

– Do not pay extra for technologies that are more expensive but no more effective than other available technologies.

More detail on these reforms is available here. Together, they have the potential to reduce the federal deficit by $100 billion or more in a decade, as scored by CBO. Many experts believe that the actual savings to the federal government would be orders of magnitude greater. And of course, the total savings to the health care system would be even greater.

Such reforms are vastly superior to misguided policies that do not actually reduce health care costs, but merely shift them. Unnecessary cuts to benefits and indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts to providers—as the Super Committee is reportedly considering—are blunt methods of reducing the federal deficit. Instead, the Super Committee should seize the opportunity to modernize the health care system—and reduce total health care costs while improving the quality of care.

Baby boomers continue to express concerns about financing long-term care needs at the end of life, and federal spending on care through Medicaid is quickly spiraling out of control. But Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) said he was “gleeful” about the demise of the Affordable Care Act’s CLASS program during an Energy and Commerce hearing this morning. Watch it:

Advocates had hoped that CLASS would serve as a long-term care option for people who need special assistance eating, bathing, or getting dressed, but HHS canceled the program after determining that it did not have the authority to ensure is sustainability. Still, advocates believe that an insurance program that individuals pay into is a much more efficient way of financing long-term care than dumping the problem on the already-strained Medicaid system and continue to urge the Secretary to use her discretion to explore ways of rebuilding the CLASS program. But Gingrey, a self-professed small government conservative, disagrees.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) slammed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for abandoning CLASS, the Affordable Care Act’s long-term care insurance program, and accused the administration of playing into the “same negative theme” of Republicans on the hill during a Joint Oversight and Invesitations and Health Subcommittee hearing this morning. “I would ask the department go back to the drawing board, be optimistic, and come back with a plan that implements the CLASS Act,” he said in his opening statement. Watch it:

Pallone’s push may be the very first public sign of growing frustration among some Democratic lawmakers and long-term care advocates who believe the administration has not done all it could to implement the program, given the difficulty Americans face in obtaining necessary coverage. Since Medicare does not provide long-term benefits, Americans spend more than $200 billion a year on services in nursing homes, at home, or in assisted living facilities. But families often can’t afford to purchase private coverage, and as a result spend down to “$2,000 in financial assets” to qualify for long-term care under Medicaid. The program is now the largest single provider of long-term care and by mid-century will likely swallow 16 percent of anticipated federal revenues to fund care for the baby-boom generation.

“I think we can do things. We can have affordable health care, we can have a plan on log term care and I think we understand that the American people expect us to do something,” Pallone said, warning the department that abandoning the program would sentence millions of citizens into “unnecessary poverty.” Pallone suggested that HHS can improve the sustainability of CLASS by adopting changes like phased enrollment, a temporary exclusion for coverage, and convening the program’s advisory panel to discuss additional options for improving it.

Rick Perry’s new economic plan calls for significant changes to the country’s health care programs, a la Paul Ryan, including raising the Medicare eligibility age and potentially pushing seniors out of the government health care program and into the private health insurance market. The Texas governor also reiterates his proposal to transform the current federal matching rate states receive for Medicaid into a pre-established block grant that does not keep up with actual health care costs.

Perry touted his “spending reduction” during an appearance on Fox News Business last night, stressing that while he’s willing to significantly cut the nation’s safety net programs, he won’t limit military spending:

PERRY: We know that one of the places that Mr. [Ron] Paul is going to talk about cutting and that’s in defense. And I will tell you, I’m not ready to put our national defense on the line for that kind of a meat cleaver. So there is obviously places we can cut…you look at what Paul Ryan is doing on Medicare. There are some great members of the Congress that have plans that can help us reduce spending and let me tell you, that’s what we need to have.

Watch it:

But Perry has it backwards: cuts to the military would likely have almost zero impact on national security — as they would target the many wasteful, costly weapons programs, many of which are barely even used. Reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, on the other hand, would significantly increase costs for beneficiaries and the nation and undermine care for lower-income Americans who need it most.

Opinion surveys show that the public shares these priorities and routinely ranks cutting defense spending ahead of Medicare and Medicaid cuts.