While GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain struggles to figure out his position on abortion, fellow candidate Mitt Romney decided to change his a long time ago. Once a proponent of a woman’s right to choose, the champion flip-flopper later adopted the “pro-life” position to pander to his national, more right-wing base as a presidential candidate. Following his base down an increasingly radical road, Romney is now pledging to push greater federal abortion restrictions and defines life as beginning at conception.

As Matt Yglesias points out, what makes Romney’s now-”staunch” pro-life position so distasteful is how staunchly he defended a woman’s right to choose while running for governor of the left-leaning state of Massachusetts in 2002. He fiercely denied then “that he was even slightly less pro-choice” than his opponent, offering “one of the most passionate defenses of abortion rights” heard from Romney or any male politician in an interview with the late Tim Russert. But Romney’s pro-choice views were not just relegated to one convenient debate answer. As a pro-choice advocates told the Washington Post, Romney actually slammed the entire Republican party for “being so vehemently anti-choice” and viewed any move to overturn the right to an abortion as a “serious mistake for our country“:

Melissa Kogut, the NARAL group’s executive director in 2002, recalled Wednesday that as she and other participants in the meeting began to pack their belongings to leave after the 45-minute session, Romney became “emphatic that the Republican Party was not doing themselves a service by being so vehemently anti-choice.”

The abortion rights supporters came away from the meeting pleasantly surprised. Romney declined to label himself “pro-choice” but said he eschewed all labels, including “pro-life.” He told the group that he would “protect and preserve a woman’s right to choose under Massachusetts law” and that he thought any move to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision would be a “serious mistake for our country.”

Romney’s aide Eric Fehrnstrom said the advocates are mistaken because “people’s memories change with time,” adding ironically that they “change depending on which way the political winds are blowing.”

It is important to note that Romney’s current belief that life begins at conception would effectively ban all abortions, and without question qualifies as a move to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling.

As Yglesias notes, Romney is unlikely to flop back towards a more progressive stance now that he is “bought” by the right. However, if people are at all concerned about the consistency of a candidate’s character, Romney leaves little to praise.

A new report from the health insurance industry alleges that the law’s taxes on health insurance plans will increase costs for consumers, adding up to “at least $73 billion in fees through 2019 and increase premiums between 2.8 and 3.7 percent in 2023.” The Hill’s Julian Pecquet pulls out additional findings:

– Affect individuals and smaller firms most of all;

– Further incentivize employers to self-insure their health benefits coverage as a means of avoiding these fees, which will further shift the burden of the fees to smaller employers and individuals who continue to purchase fully insured coverage;

– Increase costs in the Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug programs that will result in increased cost-sharing and premiums for enrollees;

– Increase pressure on state budgets to address increasing costs for Medicaid managed care plans; and

– Exacerbate adverse selection in the individual and small group markets as younger, healthier individuals forgo coverage, “leading to a less stable risk pool and higher premiums.”

Republicans will certainly appropriate these talking points to argue for repeal, but it’s difficult to shed any tears for an industry that’s earning record profits and is about to benefit from tens of millions of new customers as a result of the Affordable Care Act. If anything, the appropriate response isn’t to roll back the taxes — which are necessary to finance reform and ensure that coverage expansion is fully paid for — but to strengthen the law’s regulatory provisions.

The ACA already requires insurers to spend 80 to 85 percent of their premium dollars on health care rather than administrative expenses and forces companies to justify proposed premium increases. And if the industry is now telling us that it doesn’t have the tools to control premium increases, then perhaps we need to bring back some of the cost control measures it defeated during the health reform debate. I’m looking at you, public option.

Last night, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — the sponsor of the Senate bill to repeal the CLASS Act — offered a unanimous consent request to advance a measure that would eliminate the long-term care program to the Senate floor, but was met with an objection from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). The West Virginian insisted that the country needs a more sustainable long-term care system and argued that it could be “amended through the legislative process to make it sustainable over the long term”:

ROCKEFELLER: Always our friends on the other side of the aisle appeal something. You can lead people to the same sense of suffering as we found during the pepper commission where people prostrate themselves in order to qualify for medicaid, in which they haven’t a chance at getting some long-term care. [...] Those who are gloating today about the administration’s decision not to carry forward with the class act are not the fiscal heroes they make themselves out to be. They have no answers. They have no answers. They have no alternative.

Watch it:

Businesses and states opposing the Affordable Care Act continue to benefit from it, the Associated Press’ Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports, and have applied for and received grants from the early retiree benefit program. The $5 billion fund established by the new health care law is designed to help employers and states “maintain coverage for early retirees age 55 and older who are not yet eligible for Medicare” by paying 80 percent of their claims:

Two Texas public employee programs are among the top 25 recipients of the federal subsidy despite Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s opposition to the law Republicans derisively call “Obamacare.” And records show the Huntsman family business, where GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman sharpened his executive skills, received about $1 million. It highlights the gap between dire Republican rhetoric about the health care overhaul and the pragmatic impulse to cash in on a new government benefit. [...]

The Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a statewide system for public education employees, received more than $70 million as of Sept. 22, according to the federal Health and Human Services Department. The Employees Retirement System of Texas, which covers state employees, received about $30 million. Huntsman International, the main operating subsidiary of the family-founded chemical conglomerate, is also collecting subsidies.

Indeed, ThinkProgress has previously reported that Koch Industries, the oil, chemicals, and manufacturing conglomerate that has spent millions of dollars opposing reform also received grant dollars from it, as did more than a dozen members of the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Since approving some 6,000 applicants, the early retiree program has since reached its limit and has stopped accepting new applications.