Our guest blogger is Lucy Panza, a policy analyst with the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Cent for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) introduced H.R. 3324, the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act. The bill would expand upon “age-appropriate comprehensive sex education programs” that are “medically accurate and evidence-based,” and also, just as importantly, cease all federal funding for abstinence-only sex education. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) summarizes the bill’s other highlights:

– Recognizing young people’s right to sexual health information–the first time federal legislation has ever done so

– Preparing young people to make informed, responsible and healthy decisions about relationships and sexual health by including a comprehensive range of topics such as communication and decision-making skills; promoting safe and healthy relationships; and preventing unintended pregnancy, HIV, other STDs, dating violence, sexual assault, bullying, and harassment

– Including grants for comprehensive sex education programs for adolescents and young adults in institutions of higher education

– Requiring all funded programs to be inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and heterosexual youth and meet the needs of young people who are and are not sexually active

– Providing resources for teacher training to ensure that our nation’s sex educators have the tools they need to provide the highest quality comprehensive sex education possible to our nation’s youth.

Why is this legislation necessary? For decades, the federal government has been involved in the business of funding medically inaccurate and dangerously under-researched abstinence-only sex education, which only focuses on telling youth not to have sex and uses scare tactics to demonize pre-marital sex. What has resulted, as documented in recent research by Choice USA, is a severe lack of information about reproductive health among our youth who, not surprisingly, engage in sexual activity regardless of what their antiquated curriculum dictates. Furthermore, sex ed has traditionally been focused on heterosexual sexual activity only, which leaves out lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

As Senator Lautenberg said in support of this legislation, “Growing up isn’t easy and our kids find themselves in tough situations every day. They need all the information to make smart choices and ‘abstinence-only’ programs don’t work. It’s time to bring sex education up-to-date to reflect the real life situations facing young Americans.” Indeed.

Our guest blogger is Paul Breer, a former ThinkProgress intern.

The Heritage Foundation’s website declares that the individual mandate “violates personal liberty” and is “inherently at odds with the original vision of the Framers,” but they conveniently forget to mention that the individual mandate was actually their idea. In 1989, the Heritage’s Stuart M. Butler gave a lecture titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.” Stuart’s lecture disclosed Heritage’s plan to reform the health care system, which called for an individual mandate:

If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate but society feels no obligation to repair his car. But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services – even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab.

Many states now…require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement…Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.

Even Newt Gingrich admitted in the Republican debate on Oct. 20 that the individual mandate originally came from the conservative Heritage Foundation. In fact, many Republicans in the 1990s, including Charles Grassley (R-IA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Bob Dole (R-KS), and Richard Lugar (R-IN), supported a national requirement for health insurance. As ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky writes, many of the GOP presidential candidates have supported the individual mandate, including Romney, Gingrich, Huntsman, and former candidate Tim Pawlenty.

Showing just how far to the right the Republicans have moved, the Heritage Foundation originally touted the individual mandate as a way to help “those who need it most” and make the “health care industry as efficient and consumer sensitive as possible.” But now, from David Brooks calling his own Party not “fit to govern” to Pat Roberts calling the GOP field too “extreme,” Republicans are moving so fast to the right that their own ideas can’t keep up.

In their relentless ideological crusade against President Obama’s health care reform law, Florida’s GOP lawmakers have repeatedly proven willing to throw the state’s most vulnerable citizens under the bus to make a statement. Gov. Rick Scott (R) has rejected millions of federal dollars to provide health care for retirees, seniors, children, and people with disabilities. Florida Republicans have even turned down money to fight child abuse and neglect.

Now the Florida Independent reports that cancer patients are the latest group to suffer from Republicans’ political games and unwillingness to accept federal grants:

Among the long list of federal health grants the state has shunned in the past year was a small award that would have “reduced the burden of cancer.”

A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health tells The Florida Independent that budget authority was denied for a competitive grant “awarded to Florida beginning October 2010 for $175,000 yearly.” [...]

The grant did not require any contributions from the state. [...]

According to a recent report by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, Florida is among many states that have “missed opportunities to enact laws and policies that could not only save money and generate revenue, but also save lives.”

State advisory councils working on the Florida Cancer Plan noted that the rejected grant would have “accelerated prevention and risk reduction policies and efforts.” The grant money would have been used for several important plans, including creating a forum to improve continuing care for cancer patients, initiatives to reduce tobacco use, and programs to reduce obesity in school-aged children.

Local officials throughout the state have voiced their frustration at Scott for turning away money they desperately need simply to grandstand against health care reform.

Scott is a former private health industry executive who made his fortune downsizing hospitals for profit. His partisan demagoguery on health reform and other issues has helped make him the least popular governor in America.

Scott’s claim to be standing on principle by vetoing health care money is especially disingenuous given that this year he signed a budget that uses $370 million of federal stimulus money after he vowed to “fight all stimulus money.”

Here is how Mitt Romney introduced his health care replacement bill during Wednesday night’s GOP Presidential debate in Michigan:

Health care in 30 seconds is a little tough. But let me try. Number one, you return to the states the responsibility for caring for their own uninsured. And you send the Medicaid money back to the states so they can craft their own programs. That’s number one.

Number two, you let individuals purchase their own insurance. Not just getting it through their company. But buy it on their own if they want to, and no longer discriminate against individuals who want to buy their insurance.

You can read my thoughts on solution number one here. Number two is even more interesting because it’s so nonspecific that one can read it as an apt description of the Affordable Care Act Romney wants to repeal or the Massachusetts health care law he championed. Under those programs, individuals and families purchase coverage through exchanges that are not tied to employment and the insurers that participate are prohibited from discriminating against individuals with pre-existing conditions.

But that’s not what Romney has in mind. As he explained in his May health care speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he would permit companies to sell policies across state lines and allow residents in say New York to purchase insurance from Nebraska. Since companies will no longer be bound by the market regulations in their home states and could sell insurance to applicants in any other state, they’ll be encouraged to plant themselves in places that have very few requirements and from which the could sell bare-bone subprime policies to the healthiest (and most profitable) beneficiaries. Companies would have little incentive to do business in states that require coverage for such things as cancer screenings or have guaranteed issue protections and sell plans across the country that deny coverage altogether to high-cost cases.

That doesn’t sound like a very good deal for the 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions. They will have a hard time finding affordable insurance that offers the comprehensive coverage they need. But wait — Romney is offering a safety valve: insurers could “no longer discriminate against individuals who want to buy their insurance,” he explained last night. It’s not entirely clear how this concept could work without a policy that incentivizes younger and healthier applicants to purchase coverage — after all, if beneficiaries are guaranteed insurance, they’ll simply wait to fall ill before purchasing it, increasing costs for responsible applicants who had been paying into the pool their entire lives — but Romney’s Ann Arbor speech may offer a clue: He promises to “Ensure that individuals with preexisting conditions who are continuously covered for a specified period may not be denied coverage.” That sounds a lot different than how Romney described his plan during the debate since his definition of “continuously” and “specified period” could leave many Americans without access to health care insurance.