For House Republicans, this year has been the year of outlandish answers to non-existent problems. And tomorrow, they will offer the magnum opus of their 2011 campaign against a woman’s right to choose: the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA). The bill seeks to somehow protect the “civil rights” of fetuses by banning physicians from performing abortions based on the fetus’s race or sex. While the woman would be exempt from prosecution, physicians who perform the procedure can be sued for damages.

Tomorrow, the measure will enter the spotlight in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, as will the man behind the effort: GOP Rep. Trent Franks (AZ). His chief motivation, he told the Daily Caller, is to solely to end discrimination, or as his chief proponents argue, the genocide of minority fetuses:

According to Franks, a ban on these types of abortions is needed because minority babies are aborted at five times the rate of white babies and, based on a 2008 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Census data shows that certain populations have ‘son-biased” ratios due to “sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stages.”[...]

“People will say I have a greater agenda — and they are right — I hope for a day when all children, regardless of race or color, all children because they are children will be protected,” he said.

“But right now regardless of what the long term impact of this might be the short term impact is very simple: Can we not agree that aborting a child based on a child’s race or sex is wrong?”

The act of such selective abortion would be a problem worth addressing if it was actually a problem. In his own state of Arizona (which recently passed a statewide version of this bill), not one state official or independent search offered any support for the claim that women abort babies based on race. What’s more, not only have the number of baby girls born increased since abortion became legal but only 5 percent of abortions take place beyond the point when a fetus’s sex can be determined. In reality, rather than addressing any verifiable prejudice, the bill actually exacerbates the discrimination Franks claims to be targeting.

The real reasons behind high abortion rates among African Americans and minorities are complex. Higher rates of unintended pregnancies, inadequate health insurance, substandard health care, ineffective use of birth control, and poor sex education often leave abortion as the only choice for women. The chief reason behind abortions is unintended pregnancy, not unwanted race or sex.

In February 2009, Newt Gingrich praised President Obama’s American Recovery Act for including investments in health information technology and increasing the federal government’s match for the Medicaid program (via Andrew Kaczynski):

GINGRICH: There are two good things from the standpoint of health. The first is, a very serious investment in health information technology, which takes us a significant step down the road toward really having electronic health records for every American and I applaud President Obama for developing and insisting on that approach. And second, a substantial amount of money for Medicaid, which will in fact help the states this year, at least in the short term period, to be able to pay their bills and to help hospitals and doctors who otherwise would face very severe cuts.

Watch it:

Gingrich now rarely mentions these provisions as he campaigns for the presidency in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and instead condemns both the stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act in the broadest possible strokes, trying to obscure the fact that he has advocated for some of the very same provisions that President Obama has signed into law.

On Saturday, during the GOP presidential forum on Fox News’ Huckabee, Mitt Romney conceded that his 2006 health care reform law in Massachusetts did not lower health care spending, saying the effort was focused on expanding coverage to the uninsured. “We had hoped that what we did would bring down the cost of health care, even in a modest way. That didn’t happen,” he said. “There’s some who say its come down a little bit, or the rate of growth has come down a little bit. But in terms of getting down the cost of health care, that’s the real objective we ought to be looking at the federal level.” Watch it:

Indeed, Massachusetts opted for the “coverage first” approach and state lawmakers are now tackling the question of how to reduce health care spending while improving care quality. But it’s also worth reiterating that reform has been far more cost efficient than conservative critics and Romney — who always has one foot out the door when it comes to his signature law — would suggest. Consider the following data, via Jon Gruber:

– Premiums have fallen dramatically in the non-group market: According to AHIP (2007, 2009), from 2006 to 2009 non-group premiums rose by 14 percent nationally; over that same period, they fell by 40 percent in Massachusetts. Some of that decline was due to a buy-down of non-group benefits; analysis by the Connector staff suggests that the decline for a given benefit structure was 20 percent.

– Cost increases are on trend with the national spikes: From 2005 to 2009, the typical cost of a single employer policy in Massachusetts rose from $4,380/year to $5,304/year, a 21 percent increase; the typical cost of a single employer policy nationally over this period rose from $4,024/year to $4,824/year, a 20 percent increase.

— Implementation costs were not higher than projected: Legislative staff in 2006 projected that the Commonwealth Care program would cost $750 million when fully implemented. In FY 2009, the first full year of implementation, costs were $800 million; for FY 2010, costs are only $735 million, below the original projections. A study of net cost of reform in the state has been $707 million, roughly half of which is borne by the federal government. Given that the state has newly insured about 300,000 individuals according to survey evidence, that is a cost of only $2,350 per newly insured.

Spending for the first full year of implementation was indeed higher than projected — “because more members enrolled than had been anticipated” — but as enrollment leveled off in the subsequent years, spending came in on budget, state figures reveal:

Saturday’s New York Times offers a fairly convincing rebuke to the GOP’s push for privatizing Medicare through a premium support program that would give seniors a pre-determined contribution to purchase basic benefits from an exchange of private insurers:

What they do not say is that private plans have long been more costly than traditional Medicare and have shown far less ability to slow spending. Nor do they admit that the most extreme versions of premium support — like the one championed by Representative Paul Ryan — would save the government money mainly by shifting costs to the beneficiaries, who would have to decide whether to forgo treatments or pay more for coverage. [...]

What critics of the current program don’t acknowledge is that over the past four decades, Medicare’s spending per enrollee has risen much more slowly than private insurance premiums — an average of 8.3 percent a year between 1970 and 2009, compared with 9.3 percent for private premiums. And the private Medicare Advantage plans that cover roughly a quarter of all enrollees cost an average of 10 percent more than what the same coverage would cost in traditional Medicare.

The point here isn’t to reject changes to Medicare out of hand, but rather to voice a healthy dose of skepticism about untested reforms that would radically transform one of the nation’s most successful (and popular) government programs. On a purely theoretical level, Austin Frakt and I have discussed some of the potential shortcomings of introducing competitive bidding into the Medicare system here, but the NYT reminds us that we’ll know if that kind of approach can be successful soon enough: “The health care reform law, starting in 2014, will provide premium support subsidies to help people with modest incomes buy private policies on new insurance exchanges. That will be the next big test of whether premium support can work to hold down costs while providing good coverage. With so many uncertainties, it would be rash to weaken or jettison the traditional Medicare program now. The good news is there is some time to get it right.”

Yet another survey, this one from GfK Custom Research North America, finds that employers are unlikely to stop offering health care coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Only 12 percent of businesses surveyed said they would consider dropping insurance:

Even in an environment of uncertainty about the future of health care reform, a majority of employers surveyed (56 percent) say that they are likely to continue to offer employer-sponsored health insurance after health care reform is enacted,… Only 12 percent of benefits decision-makers say they would be very or somewhat likely to drop coverage, and another 32 percent of the 502 private-sector companies surveyed are unsure what they will do.

Projections vary by the size of employer, with only four percent of decision-makers surveyed from those companies with 500 or more employees considering terminating coverage completely. In addition, decision-makers who say they are familiar with health care reform are less likely to foresee their dropping coverage (7 percent, versus 15 percent among those not familiar).

While 87 percent of company health care decision-makers said that increasing costs could force their companies to reconsider offering insurance, “nearly as many, 82 percent, say the effect on employee morale will be important” — suggesting that businesses may think twice about ending coverage if the decision would turn off highly valued employees and send them running into the hands of the competition. (Incidentally, those workers “receive better benefits and, through the tax system, better subsidies through employer provided coverage than through newly created insurance exchanges.”)