Ben Smith gets this quote from Mitt Romney spokesperson Gail Gitcho on the candidate’s stance on abortion: Romney supports “a Human Life Amendment that overturns Roe vs. Wade and sends the issue back to the states.” “Mitt Romney is pro-life, and as he has said previously, he is supportive of efforts to ensure recognition that life begins at conception. He believes these matters should be left up to states to decide,” she said.

That answer’s “states’ rights” emphasis sounds good for a candidate who’s hoping to sway independent voters in a general election, but it still doesn’t answer whether or not Romney supported Mississippi’s personhood amendment before it went down in flames — a question he skillfully avoided last month and his campaign refused to answer — and actually undermines his promises to more conservative audiences.

For instance, during an Oct. 3 appearance on Fox News’ Huckabee, Romney hinted that he would support additional federal abortion restrictions: “I would encourage legislation which provided to individuals the information they needed to make a choice, an informed choice about whether or not to have an abortion,” he said, referring to mandated counseling or waiting periods. Similarly, during the Palmetto Freedom Forum on Sept. 5 in South Carolina, Romney promised to “absolutely” strengthen federal conscience protections for health care workers who refuse to perform abortions. “We have to allow people to practice their faith and when they have a matter of conscience that they can’t participate in some form of activity which violates their faith, then they should be able to abide by their faith, particularly when there are plenty of opportunities for people to have a service provided,” Romney said.

A new Commonwealth survey finds that the United States leads wealthy nations in the number of adults who can’t afford health care services and end up skipping care altogether. Forty-two percent of Americans with health issues chose to go without care, the survey found, compared to a range of 1 to 14 percent of adults in 10 other countries. Also, more than a quarter said they could not or had difficulty paying their medical debt.

The chart below demonstrates how the U.S. compares with the rest of the world:

The study puts another dent in the GOP’s claim that the United States has the best health care system in the world. In truth, too many Americans lack access to it and thus often forgo needed treatments and preventive services that could forestall more intensive and expensive treatments and even improve health care outcomes.

-Rebecca Leber

Brian Beutler reports that Newt Gingrich has come out in favor of doing away with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — the only nonpartisan entity that evaluates how legislative proposals effect the national deficit:

“If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies,” Gingrich said at a Saturday debate with embattled pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain. “Every hospital will tell you that if you get the family and patient involved, it is better and less expensive. The Congressional Budget Office refuses to see this as a savings. It wants more bureaucracy and less patient involvement.”

In a technical sense, Gingrich is correct. The Congressional Budget Office will make it hard for Republicans to completely repeal Obamacare, even if they unify control of government in 2013. CBO is the agency that evaluates for lawmakers the impact their legislation is expected to have on the federal budget. And unfortunately for Republicans, the health care law was devised to score as a deficit reducer, particularly after its first 10 years of existence. By direct corollary, the CBO says repealing the whole thing would increase projected deficits. For political and (more importantly) procedural reasons, that would make a complete repeal almost impossible.

Of course, the CBO doesn’t actually lie. Rather, it follows budgetary rules that Congress “originally established in the conference report on the Balanced Budget Act of 1997″ and Gingrich personally voted for. And yes, those rules often ignore savings from prevention and delivery system reforms that many economists believe would modernize the health care system and result in real savings and efficiences. If lawmakers want to receive credit for those savings, however, they can do something far less dramatic than eliminating the budget office and simply vote to change CBO’s scoring methods.

Politico’s David Nather pressed Tom Coburn on his proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age and wondered if the senator was at all concerned that younger seniors (those between the ages of 65 and 67) would go uninsured if the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were also repealed. Coburn notes that his latest proposal with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) assumed that the law remains enact, but said he wouldn’t mind increasing eligibility even if seniors had no clear alternative for obtaining coverage:

NATHER: You say you made a choice to assume that the Affordable Care Act survives in your legislation with Sen. Lieberman, but you don’t have to. What is your feeling if the eligibly age becomes a point of compromise on the deficit, is it necessary for Republicans to assume that at least the exchanges and guarantee issue survive?

COBURN: It doesn’t have to. The fact is we have a difficulty right now with people who are retiring — if they’re retiring before 65 or they’re retiring before 67 which we would propose eventually getting to — they have a difficulty buying an insurance product. But again, our big problem in health care is that a third of the dollars we spend in health care doesn’t help anybody.

Watch it:

Note that rather than discussing strategies for expanding coverage to those he would literally push out of Medicare, Coburn embarks on a rant about identifying waste in the system and reducing spending. One wonders if Romney — who also repeals the health law while increasing the Medicare age — would agree with this answer.

Family USA’s Ron Pollack makes an important point at the very bottom of this Kaiser Health News article about Mitt Romney’s Medicare “premium support” proposal. The former Massachusetts governor is seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, while gradually increasing the Medicare eligibility age. That means that younger seniors won’t have the option of enrolling in the ACA’s state-based exchanges and will likely end up uninsured:

In addition to transforming Medicare into a premium support program, Romney would raise the program’s eligibility age to reflect the fact that Americans are living longer. But he has premised all of his changes on first repealing the 2010 health law.

That could leave some retirees without health coverage, because older people are more likely than younger ones to have chronic, pre-existing medical conditions. Without the health law’s requirement that insurers cover most people, many could not obtain affordable coverage.

“If you eliminate the Affordable Care Act, it means that 65 and 66 year olds won’t have that resource. The result will be a substantial number of people joining the ranks of the uninsured. Many of these folks are retired and have moderate incomes, so this is going to be a huge setback for a large number of 65 and 66 year olds who would lose coverage,” Pollack said.

Now, Romney will likely offer some kind of high-risk pool alternative, but that coverage will likely be too expensive for most. And so what we’ll see is uninsured 65 to 67 year olds entering the Medicare program sicker than they otherwise would have been, thus increasing costs in the program. In fact, one study found that “chronically ill people turning age 65 who were previously uninsured had lower spending than insured people prior to Medicare. Yet once on Medicare, these uninsured Americans spent 50 percent more than previously insured Medicare beneficiaries who also had chronic disease.”