Susan G. Komen for the Cure is the country’s best-known and best-funded breast cancer organization. Known for it’s iconic pink ribbon and annual Race for the Cure event, the organization has invested nearly $2 billion in cancer education and research since its founding in 1982.

But today, bowing to political pressure, Komen for the Cure announced that it is severing its partnership with Planned Parenthood and will stop providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants that allow their centers to perform breast exams on women who could not otherwise get them.

Since anti-abortion activists and their Republican allies ratcheted up their crusade against Planned Parenthood last year, they’ve targeted any and all allies of the organization to try to make inroads, including the cancer charity. Planned Parenthood provides birth control, STD testing, and cancer screenings to low-income women.

In a press release Planned Parenthood said it was deeply saddened and disappointed by the decision:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America today expressed deep disappointment in response to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s decision to stop funding breast cancer prevention, screenings and education at Planned Parenthood health centers. Anti-choice groups in America have repeatedly threatened the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation for partnering with Planned Parenthood to provide these lifesaving cancer screenings and news articles suggest that the Komen Foundation ultimately succumbed to these pressures.

“We are alarmed and saddened that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation appears to have succumbed to political pressure. Our greatest desire is for Komen to reconsider this policy and recommit to the partnership on which so many women count,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In the last few weeks, the Komen Foundation has begun notifying local Planned Parenthood programs that their breast cancer initiatives will not be eligible for new grants (beyond existing agreements or plans).

Komen’s pretext for ending the alliance is the spurious congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood led by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL). Democrats say the far-reaching investigation is a political witch hunt and abuse of government resources.

Komen’s new Senior Vice President of Public Policy, Karen Handel, not only has a long anti-choice history, but pledged to eliminate grants for Planned Parenthood to provide breast and cervical cancer screenings when she ran for governor of Georgia in 2010.

According to Planned Parenthood, in the past five years support from Susan G. Komen allowed their health centers to provide nearly 170,000 breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals. The charity’s decision has succeeded only in depriving low-income women of cancer screenings that could save their lives — a move that flies in the face of Komen’s mission.

Our guest blogger is Topher Spiro, the Managing Director of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress.

The Affordable Care Act includes a requirement that new health insurance plans offered to individuals and small businesses cover “essential health benefits.” The law requires coverage of benefits within 10 broad categories, including maternity and newborn care, mental health benefits, and prescription drugs. Today, many of these benefits are not typically offered by individual health care plans and employer coverage may eschew wellness services and pediatric oral and vision care. The 10 categories, therefore, go a long way to ensure that insurance provides access to needed care. But otherwise, the law tasks the Secretary of Health and Human Services to define the essential health benefits (the “EHB”).

On December 16, 2011, the Secretary did just that. The Department of Health and Human Services released an “Essential Health Benefits Bulletin”—its proposed framework for defining the EHB. Under that approach, states can choose a benchmark plan from among the largest small employer plans, Federal Employees Health Benefits Plans, or state employee plans, or the largest HMO plan offered in a state.

In evaluating this proposed approach, it’s important to remember the purposes of the EHB. First, the EHB should ensure that coverage provides access to essential health care. Second, the EHB should minimize abuse in which insurers design benefits to attract healthier individuals and deter less healthy individuals. And third, the EHB should provide some degree of standardization to make it easier for consumers and small businesses to make apples-to-apples plan comparisons. On this last point, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that standardization is a key element in enhancing competition and lowering premiums.

HHS’s proposed approach has the potential to meet these objectives in the short term, but would require substantial review and oversight—which could in turn require some modification. Based upon further review and analysis, HHS may need to reduce the number of potential benchmark plans.

Research indicates that the potential benchmark plans cover substantially similar benefits. But insurers might impose a dollar limit, frequency/visit limit, and/or other nonmonetary limits (prior authorization) on a specific benefit. Insurers could use such limits as loopholes that undermine the ACA’s prohibitions on lifetime and annual limits and the EHB itself. Substantial review and oversight is therefore needed to ensure that no benchmark plans—in particular, small employer plans—impose limits that are inconsistent with medical practice or that undermine the ACA’s important consumer protections.

Also, allowing insurers to substitute benefits or limits could undermine the purposes of the EHB. Insurers could use this flexibility to design benefits that attract healthier individuals and deter less healthy individuals—in other words, to “cherry pick” enrollees. Moreover, too much flexibility could exponentially increase the number of plan designs offered through the exchange—making it more difficult for consumers and small businesses to compare and enroll in plans.

All in all, given practical realities, a state-based approach is sensible for the short term and will help ensure a smooth implementation in 2014. Over the long term, however, a state-based approach would not be sustainable, and HHS should adopt a national benchmark as soon as possible. That benchmark should guide both the scope of covered services as well as limits on those services. It should also ensure that the package is equivalent in value to the benefits that members of Congress receive. Such a benchmark would be clear, consistent, and ensure a degree of comprehensiveness that is widely acceptable.

You can read CAP’s full comment letter here.

The Virginia legislature is starting off 2012 with a bicameral attack on a woman’s right to choose. The General Assembly’s very first bill, House Bill 1, is a “personhood” amendment that seeks to essentially outlaw abortions. Over in the state senate, Sen. Jill Vogel (R) has introduced a bill that would require all women seeking an abortion “to have an ultrasound image taken to determine the gestational age of the fetus.” Piqued by the unnecessary intrusion into a woman’s doctor-patient relationship, state Sen. Janet Howell (D) sought to level the playing field.

“If pregnant women should have to get an ultrasound before having an abortion, men should have to undergo additional medical procedures before getting a prescription for erectile dysfunction,” she noted, and introduced an amendment to Vogel’s bill requiring that men “undergo a digital rectal exam” for pills like Viagra:

On Monday Howell expressed her disdain for legislation requiring the ultrasound by proposing an amendment she described as a simple matter of fairness. Her amendment said that before being treated for erectile dysfunction, a man would have to undergo a digital rectal exam and a cardiac stress test.

“We should just have a little gender equity here,” Howell said.

Vogel argued that “erectile dysfunction, in this context, is different from pregnancy,” and the “gender equity” amendment failed in a 21 to 19 vote mostly along party lines. Vogel’s ultrasound bill will receive a final vote today, and is expected to clear the full Senate.

Aware that such measures are a blatant attempt to obstruct and intimidate women from considering their constitutional right to an abortion, Howell pointed out that the ultrasound is also “adding to the cost” and “opening up [women] to emotional blackmail.”

Outlays for Medicare, Medicaid and “other mandatory federal programs related to health care accounted for just under 40 percent of mandatory spending in 2011,” the Congressional Budget Office reported today and will continue to grow into the future. For instance, a boost in the number of beneficiaries will increase Medicare spending to more than $1 trillion by 2022, reflecting 4.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, (GDP) and raise Medicaid spending to $605 billion:

Interestingly, the growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary over the 2012–2022 period will only average “1 percent a year more than the rate of inflation” — compared to a 5 percent a year growth between 1985 and 2007 — as a result of “the anticipated influx of younger, healthier beneficiaries” and the constraining effects of the SGR formula and the limits on updates to payment rates for other services,” the CBO projects. Per-beneficiary spending will increase thereafter as a result of “rising drug costs” and “more generous benefits enacted in the Affordable Care Act.” Outlays will increase if Congress patches the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) and prevents a scheduled 27 percent fee reduction for Medicare doctors in March 2012, as lawmakers have pledged to do. “If payment rates stay as they are now through 2022, outlays for Medicare (net of premiums) would be $9 billion higher in 2012 and about $316 billion (or about 5 percent) higher between 2013 and 2022,” CBO concludes.

Expenditures on Medicaid, on the other hand, will decrease in 2012 “as states become responsible for a higher share of total costs than had been the case in recent years.” The program grow steadily between 2014 an 2016, when more lower-income Americans become eligible for Medicaid under health care reform. By 2022, about “95 million people will be enrolled in Medicaid at some point in the year, CBO estimates.”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into Mitt Romney this morning for falsely claiming that President Obama is the only president “in history that’s cut Medicare by $500 billion” and scaring senior citizens about the future of the program. “It’s pathetic!” Scarborough exclaimed, before pointing out that Romney himself supports large reductions to the program and has endorsed Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms:

SCARBOROUGH: That is the most shameful demagoguery that I have heard on the campaign trail yet this year. To tell senior citizens that the program that is going to bankrupt America unless we figure out a way to bend the cost curve, is going to be protected forever and can you believe that Barack Obama cut $500 billion from it? It’s just unspeakable…it is unspeakable, because this country is going bankrupt and Mitt Romney is trying to scare senior citizens — you know what? It’s what we called Mediscare in ’95 and ’96. It was pathetic when Bill Clinton did it it’s pathetic when Mitt Romney does it, it’s pathetic when he does it because of Medicare Advantage. Pathetic.

Watch it:

“And Mitt Romney’s on record as supporting Paul Ryan’s plan, which as far as I remember it, actually takes huge, makes huge savings/cuts to Medicare,” New York Magazine’s John Heilemann added. Indeed, the Ryan plan fundamentally transforms Medicare’s structure into a guaranteed contribution program, significantly reduces its growth rate, and actually maintains many of the savings included in the Affordable Care Act. Romney himself has introduced very similar reductions as part of his own Medicare proposal.

In his attempt to win the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich has had no problem discarding old positions and embracing a more conservative stance when it comes to government intervention in women’s fertility. To placate the right-wing base of the party, he’s even parroting the rhetoric of the radical personhood movement, which is pursuing legislation that would not only criminalize all abortion but outlaw common forms of birth control as well.

Now the supposedly “pro-life” candidate is backing another goal of the personhood movement — making it more difficult for couples to conceive through in vitro fertilization:

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich called Sunday for a commission to study the ethical issues relating to in vitro fertilization clinics, where infertile women receive treatment to get pregnant and large numbers of embryos are created.

“If you have in vitro fertilization you are creating life. And therefore we should look seriously at what should the rules be for clinics that do that because they’re creating life,” said Gingrich, who opposes abortion and says life begins at conception.

Gingrich, who is campaigning for votes in Tuesday’s Florida primary, did not expand on his proposal for a commission. His remarks seemed to open the possibility of a larger federal role over IVF clinics across the country than currently exists.

As ThinkProgress previously reported, personhood legislation could ban couples from conceiving children through IVF, or at least drastically change how it’s practiced, making it less effective and more dangerous. Personhood USA — and now Gingrich too apparently — disapproves of IVF because the process involves discarding embryos.

Although IVF has long been an accepted practice for helping couples struggling with infertility to get pregnant, religious extremists have condemned it for allowing doctors to “play God.” Around 58,000 American IVF babies are born each year, comprising more than 1 percent of all births in the U.S.

A new Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll found that support for certain components of President Obama’s health reform law seems to be slowly increasing with time. According to the report, the percentage of Americans polled who are in support of the law’s provision preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions has jumped to 71 percent from just 64 percent at the end of 2010.

Other provisions of the ACA that are gaining acceptance since November 2010: creating insurance exchanges where people can shop for insurance is up to 59 percent from 51 percent; requiring research to measure the effectiveness of different treatments is now at 53 percent from 44 percent; and providing tax credits to small businesses to help pay for their employees’ insurance is now up 70 percent versus 60 percent.

– Fatima Najiy

The Romney campaign has issued a release highlighting Newt Gingrich’s support for a federal individual mandate, similar to the provision included in the Affordable Care Act. “THERE IS NO DENYING IT … GINGRICH ADVOCATED FOR THE OBAMACARE MANDATE,” the release says in capital letters and shows a picture depicting the former House Speaker as an “unreliable leader”:

But Romney himself had repeatedly called for a national responsibility requirement before launching his bid for the presidency and even flirted with maintaining the ACA’s provision as recently as April 2010.

Below is a table matching every quote the Romney campaign is touting as evidence of Gingrich’s support for the individual requirement with one of Romney’s own endorsements:

Verum Serum finds audio of Newt Gingrich touting the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in a call with health care clients from May 2009. Relying on rhetoric that echoes Mitt Romney’s and President Obama’s defense of the provision, Gingrich explains, “We believe that there should be must carry, that is everyone is expected to have health insurance or if you’re an absolute libertarian we would allow you to post a bond, but we would not allow people to be free-riders, failing to insure themselves and then showing up at the emergency room with no means of payment.” “If you have must-carry then the insurance companies told us you can have must issue and you will therefore have a system in which you don’t have to have a system of cherry picking and maneuvering.” Listen:

Gingrich’s think tank — the Center for Health Transformation — serves approximately 94 health industry corporations and lobby groups, including health insurance (BlueCross BlueShield Association, WellPoint, AHIP, UnitedHealth), health IT (L-3 Enterprise, Microsoft, IBM), and pharmaceutical companies — with each paying up to $200,000 annually. The organization also advocates for a national individual mandate.

Newt Gingrich doubled down on his claims that the Obama administration is engaged in a “war against religion,” during a town hall in Florida this morning, and accused Mitt Romney of acting in the same “dictatorial” fashion while serving as governor of Massachusetts.

“The Obama administration is engaged in a war against religion,” Gingrich began. “Their decision last week that they would impose on every Catholic institution, every Jewish institution, every Protestant institution the Obamacare standard of what you have to buy as insurance is a direct violation of freedom of religion, an example of the dictatorial attitude of this administration,” he charged, ignoring the regulation’s religious exemption. He then went after Romney:

GINGRICH: Let me just note that in a similar circumstance, Governor Romney imposed activities on the Catholic hospitals against their opposition. Refused to allow them the right of conscience in Romneycare. Just as, by the way, he eliminated serving Kosher food to elderly Jewish residents under Medicaid.

Watch it:

In reality, Romney’s position on allowing religious institutions like Catholic hospitals to opt out of providing emergency contraception to rape victims is more complicated. In 2005, the governor vetoed a “widely supported bill” making the morning-after pill available over the counter and requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims, even after pledging to support such measures while running for governor. By September, the state legislature “easily overrode” his veto, but the Department of Public Health, which is overseen by Romney, began drafting regulations that exempted religious hospitals from the requirement.

Then suddenly, in December 2005, Romney “abruptly ordered his administration to reverse course… and require Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception medication to rape victims.” “My personal view in my heart of hearts is that people who are subject to rape should have the option of having emergency contraceptives or emergency contraceptive information,” he told the Boston Herald. Romney has since said that he would support broader federal conscience protections for health care workers and pledged to eliminate the Title X program which provides “reproductive health services like birth control” to millions of women.

Romney also angered the Jewish community in 2003 after he “nixed the funding of about $5 per day” that allocated additional dollars for “poor Jewish nursing-home residents to get kosher meals.” The governor warned that the subsidy would lead to an “increased rate for nursing facilities,” but the Massachusetts Legislature “approved an amendment to restore the $600,000 to finance the kosher meals.”

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) pledged to reintroduce his plan to privatize Medicare as part of the GOP’s budget plan in March. “I would simply say, there’s an emerging bipartisan consensus that we’re on the right track,” Ryan told host Chris Wallace. “And the point is, we should be offering solutions to our problems in our country. We shouldn’t just be demagoguing other people and offering no solution.”

Ryan would do well to follow his own advise, as the indignant House Budget Committee chairman grossly misrepresented the Affordable Care Act and the details of his own Medicare premium support solution. Below is a brief fact check:

CLAIM — MEDICARE WILL GO BANKRUPT: “The Congressional Budget Office also says Medicare is going bankrupt in 2021. The trustees at Medicare say that there’s $37 trillion unfunded liability.”

FACT: The CBO says that one part of Medicare — Part A or hospital insurance — will become “insolvent,” not bankrupt. Dedicated revenues will not be sufficient to pay all of its bills and the hospital fund will meet about 90 percent of its commitments, rather than the full 100 percent. In the succeeding years that shortfall will slowly widen and then contract, so that in 2085, Medicare could pay out 88 percent of its obligations, the program’s trustees conclude. The savings in the ACA — lowering annual payment updates to providers — has actually extended the life of the trust fund by nine years.

CLAIM — NOTHING CHANGES FOR CURRENT SENIORS: “If you take a look at our reforms, which don’t change any Medicare benefits for a person 55 or above, and says for people 54 and below, when they’ll retire, they’ll have a list of guaranteed coverage options over by Medicare just like we do it in Congress and federal employees have, and we’re not going to subsidize the wealthy as much as everybody else.”

FACT: It’s likely that beneficiaries 55 and older would see changes in their Medicare benefits. In 2022, newly-eligible seniors would have to enroll in a private plan, but existing beneficiaries (those who are over 55 today) would also have the option of leaving traditional Medicare. That opens up the possibilities of private plans trying to lure away the healthiest beneficiaries (as is currently the case in Medicare Advantage) and of health care providers abandoning traditional Medicare patients for the higher reimbursement rates of private insurers. For chronically ill seniors who are more likely to remain in fee-for-service Medicare this means two things: higher costs (as the healthier beneficiaries exit the risk pool) and fewer doctors. Ryan’s proposal also does not resemble the “coverage options” of federal employees, because his “premium support” payments do not keep up with health care costs. The FEHBP’s do.

CLAIM — ACA WILL RATION CARE: “Put that in comparison to the president’s health care law. This year, he appoints 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to a board called the IPAD, Independent Payment Advisory Board, and their job is to put price controls and therefore rationing on Medicare for current seniors. So, the president’s law takes half a trillion dollars out of Medicare to spend on Obamacare and now he’s putting this new rationing board in place, which will lead to denied care to current seniors.”

FACT: The 15 members of the IPAB are appointed by the President, but confirmed by the Senate. The group is tasked with making binding recommendations to reduce expenditures in the Medicare system, unless Congress acts to alter the proposal or discontinue automatic implementation. Significantly, their proposal to reduce spending cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 (page 409) of the Affordable Care Act stipulates.)

Our guest blogger is Emily Oshima, a Research Associate/Policy Analyst with the Health Policy team at American Progress.

On Monday, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts again urged state lawmakers to address rising health care costs in his annual state of the state address. Patrick first introduced a bill, “An Act Improving the Quality of Health Care and Controlling Costs by Reforming Health Systems and Payments,” in February 2011 in an effort to achieve comprehensive delivery system and payment reform.

Patrick’s proposal calls for replacing the current fee-for-service payment system, which creates incentives for providers to deliver more services – even unnecessary care, with a global payment system, which encourages more coordinated patient care and rewards providers for better patient health. It aims to “significantly reduce” fee-for-service payments by the end of 2015 and, as Patrick explained, “stop paying for the amount of care, and start paying for the quality of care.”

The Massachusetts bill encourages greater price transparency, consumer protections against rate increases, and medical malpractice reform to reduce the costs of defensive medicine. The legislation creates incentives for providers to better coordinate patient care and lower costs through Accountable Care Organizations (ACO). Such arrangements have already improved care for more than 100,000 Blue Shield of California patients in California and San Francisco, where better coordination among health care providers has flattened premium increases, lowered hospital readmissions by more than 20 percent, and saved $20 million in 2011.

Numerous hospitals, physician groups and insurers across the nation are adopting the ACO model in hopes of duplicating this success. For instance, Massachusetts is already home to nine ACO entities and 32 health care organizations are participating in HHS’ Pioneer ACO initiative to improve care and lower costs for Medicare patients.

Health reform in Massachusetts was wildly successful in expanding coverage to more than 98 percent of the population and now lawmakers must tackle their next big challenge: cost control.

Frank Donatelli

Start with Medicare. The trustees who run the program have been telling us for some time that the current benefit and financing system is unsustainable. Indeed, its 2010 report notes that the Medicare “trust fund” will be exhausted five years sooner than previous estimates.

The passage of “Obamacare” has made this deplorable situation worse. This law does increase various Medicare taxes and includes some cost-containment features. However, as Medicare’s own actuary has pointed out, “Obamacare” uses the savings not to strengthen Medicare but to start another unfunded entitlement. The changes — a $500 billion cut in the program — do nothing to shore up the existing Medicare trust fund.

The $500 billion in cuts Donatelli is touting is not coming out of the current Medicare budget. Rather, the law slows the program’s growth by reducing spending over the next 10 years,” phasing out overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, eliminating waste, and lowering annual payment updates to encourage more efficient care.

As a result of these savings, reform improves the sustainability of Medicare — precisely what Donatelli is so concerned about! The latest Medicare trustees report concludes that if Congress had failed to pass the ACA, the Health Insurance Fund would have started to run out out of money in 2016. But because of the law, the trust fund won’t face a shortfall until 2024.

– Zachary Bernstein

The last legal public hanging in America took place in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. The “event” attracted 20,000 people and turned into such a sickening spectacle that many credit it with ending the practice in the U.S.

But one North Carolina Republican believes that as a country we’ve grown soft since banning public hangings and is calling for them to reinstated as a deterrent to crime. If Rep. Larry Pittman had his way, “abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers” would be first in line for the gallows:

Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, who was appointed to the District 82 House seat in October, expressed his views in an email sent Wednesday to every member of the General Assembly. [...]

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

As ThinkProgress reported, last year Republicans in South Carolina, Nebraska, and Iowa pushed legislation that would essentially legalize the murder of abortion providers. Such radical sentiments have been echoed by prominent conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who said during his 2004 campaign, “I favor the death penalty for abortionists.”