Anti-choice activists are driving an increasingly radical and successful attack against a woman’s constitutional right to choose. Be it through “personhood” measures or anti-contraception bills, Republican lawmakers are trying to ban abortions under any circumstances, including rape, incest, or even when the mother’s life is in danger.

Following anti-choice activists down this radical road, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain recently declared, “I am pro-life from conception. [No] abortions, no exceptions.” Cain’s campaign has since insisted that he in fact does support exceptions. Yesterday on Capitol Hill, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) bemoaned Cain and Republicans increasing extremism on abortion. Noting that most Americans agree “that you shouldn’t have to die in order to bring a child into the world” and that “it was OK to have birth control,” she blasted the GOP for “branding themselves” as anti-government intrusion while trampling a woman’s privacy as obviously “hypocritical”:

MOORE: I think that people have overreached. This is a debate where really good decent people on either side of a woman’s right to choose can disagree. And I think where people had gotten to, people at least decided that you had the right to terminate a pregnancy if your life was in danger. That you shouldn’t have to die in order to bring a child into the world, I think people had gotten to that point. I think people had gotten to a point that if you were a victim of a traumatic rape or incest or some unusual circumstances like that that you deserved to have an abortion. [...]

And I think we’re seeing a defiance here, that really overrides the majority of American opinion, that this is something that is a private issue between a woman and her family, her doctor, and certainly an issue between a woman and her relationship with God. So Republicans who like to brand themselves as being independent of government control and regulations certainly are hypocritical with respect to this issue.

Watch it:

Of course, Cain may yet again be switching his position on abortions. If given a few hours, he’ll undoubtedly be on the radical road again.

With federal money drying up for Medicaid, states are shouldering a greater cost burden and making significant cuts to balance their budgets — just as the economic downturn is expanding the pool of eligible applicants. Since federal stimulus money ran out in June, states have spent 28.7 percent more this year on their Medicaid programs and have turned to cost-cutting strategies as a result. A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation released yesterday provides a breakdown for how many states are cutting services and benefits to contain costs:

– 46 states Introduce new provider rate restrictions, up from 39 states in 2011.

– 48 states Add provider taxes to hospitals and nursing facilities to compensate for the provider rate cuts.

– 18 states Cut benefits for consumers.

– 13 states Expand benefits, the same number as this year.

– 3 states Cut eligibility, up from two in 2011.

– 14 statesIncrease copays, up from five states in 2011.

– 33 states Expand long-term care, compared to 32 last year.

– 13 states Expand benefits, the same as this year.

– 15 states Expand eligibility, compared to 28 in 2011.

Meanwhile, state economies also feel the impact of the cuts. A June report from Families USA shows that a 5 percent cut in federal Medicaid cut means a $3.8 billion loss to New York’s economy and almost 30,000 jobs lost.

This Kaiser Family Foundation brief about the nation’s ballooning spending on long-term care insurance is particularly pertinent in the aftermath of the administration’s decision to abandon the Affordable Care Act’s CLASS program. To be clear, CLASS was never designed as an alternative to comprehensive insurance — it offered only a modest benefit, but advocates hoped that the program could serve as a first step towards a more serious (and sustainable) government investment in long-term care. As former CAP fellow Judy Feder put it during a recent interview with NPR, “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.”

Most importantly, the program offered some sort of an answer to the nation’s current reliance on Medicaid for long-term needs, which as Kaiser explains, is simply unsustainable. Consider:

- Medicaid has evolved to become our nation’s primary payer for long-term services and supports, financing nearly half (43 percent) of all spending on long-term care services.

- Among those using long-term services and supports, the average annual spending per Medicaid beneficiary was $43,296 compared to just $3,694 for Medicaid beneficiaries who did not use long-term care services.

- Sixteen percent of Medicaid beneficiaries with disabilities used long-term services and supports, but they accounted for fifty-eight percent of all Medicaid spending on people with disabilities.

Look:

Democrats may not be very interested in investing in CLASS and Republicans are eager to peel off another layer of the Affordable Care Act, but the reality is that government spending on long-term care will only increase if lawmakers don’t deal with it. Financing long-term care through a self-sustaining insurance program, rather than Medicaid, is concept both parties should be able to agree on and as Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) has suggested, Democrats should be promoting.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is out with a damning new analysis of the Democrats’ $3 trillion deficit proposal to the super committee. Republicans have already rejected the plan, despite the fact that it “stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s ‘Gang of Six,’ and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission,” Robert Greenstein, Richard Kogan, and Paul N. Van de Water argue.

“The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan,” they point out. Look:

One wonders why Democrats continue to bend over backwards to GOP demands and accept reactionary policies when Republicans don’t even appreciate the effort, dismissing the plan as “outrageously absurd” and a “non-starter.”

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that a drop in enthusiasm among Democrats has soured the public on the Affordable Care Act, with 51 percent of respondents now saying they dislike the law and only 34 percent in favor of it. The scores represent the law’s highest unfavorability rating in the 19 months the Kaiser Family Foundation has been tracking public opinion and shows a dramatic 8 percent drop in favorability for the month of October:

Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm is behind the low numbers, Kaiser found, as support among party dropped from 65 percent to 52 percent in just one month:

Kaiser attributes the low numbers to the general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and the GOP’s “heavy criticism of the law during recent debates.” The poll also found that health care reform is low on the list of issues that deserve more attention, as economy and jobs are still driving the national conversation and remain central to voters’ concerns.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was abandoning CLASS (the Affordable Care Act’s long-term care program), a development that received widespread press attention and may have raised frustrations among the law’s strongest advocates — including some Democrats in Congress. The Obama administration’s willingness to defend the law in the upcoming campaign, however, suggests that support among Democrats will likely rebound.