A Texas man has enlisted the ACLU to help him sue CVS for gender discrimination after a pharmacist refused to sell him emergency contraception.

Jason Melbourne had already visited four pharmacies in search of Plan B for his wife when he was referred to a CVS in Mesquite, Texas, some 15 miles away from his home. They had one box left:

But when he finally got there, the overnight pharmacist, Minni Matthew, told Melbourne she wasn’t going to sell it to him.

In order for him to buy the meds, the pharmacist said, she’d need to talk to and see the ID of his wife, who was at home with their two young children. He asked why, and she pointed to the fine print on the medication’s box, which says it can only be sold to someone age 17 or older. Melbourne pointed out that he was well over 17.

“I’ve bought this plenty of times in my life, and it’s never been a problem,” he said. “Are you telling me every other place I’ve bought it from has been wrong?”

Didn’t matter, Matthew said, since the medicine obviously wasn’t for him.

“Why don’t you show me the law that says you can’t sell this to a man?” Melbourne replied.

The situation got worse from there. Melbourne put his wife on the phone and even Googled the medication to show the pharmacist there was no law against selling it to a man. But “she didn’t want to see it,” he said.

That’s when a male pharmacy technician informed Melbourne that they didn’t want to sell emergency contraception to men because they might be giving it to “rape victims.”

Jezebel notes that Melbourne’s ordeal happened around the same time that a Houston CVS store refused to sell another man Plan B. CVS apologized for that last month, calling it an “isolated incident.” It wasn’t.

In fact, in 2010 ACLU received reports that Walgreens stores in Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma were refusing to sell emergency contraception to men. Walgreens relented when the ACLU confronted them publicly.

In an email about the Houston incident, CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis insisted they’d briefed all their stores on official company policy, which is “to follow FDA regulations for the sale of emergency contraception, which allows this product to be sold without a prescription to customers who are at least 17 years old, regardless of gender.”

But they obviously need to do a better job educating their stores, because the manager of the Mesquite CVS insisted they’re not supposed to sell Plan B to men because they can’t verify that the woman who takes it will be over 17.

Lisa Graybill, the legal director of the Texas ACLU, says refusing to sell Plan B to men based on this baseless “sensational story” is “misguided.” “I’m not aware of a single case of a man reportedly buying it to push on his underage pedophile victim,” she says.

“I’m outraged,” Melbourne says of the situation. “I chased this thing all over town, then I get accused of using this for rape, even after they’ve talked to my wife on the phone. It makes me feel like a piece of crap.”

Our guest blogger is Emily Oshima, a research associate/policy analyst with the Health Policy team at American Progress.

Earlier this week, CAP Senior Fellow and oncologist Zeke Emanuel co-authored an editorial that questions the increasing use of proton beam therapy to treat cancer patients, given the clear lack of clinical evidence on its efficacy and substantially higher costs.

In theory, proton beam therapy can zap cancerous tissue with much greater precision than conventional photon radiation treatment, minimizing damage to healthy tissue surrounding a malignancy and reducing side effects. Although proton beam therapy has been in use since the 1950s, randomized clinical trials for the treatment of prostate cancer -– which proton therapy is frequently used to treat — are completely lacking. Existing studies are smaller, single institution, and short-term, and are unable to evaluate long-term outcomes, including onset of delayed side-effects. Additionally, although proton beam therapy has been shown to effectively treat certain rare childhood cancers — mainly brain and spinal cord tumors — the treatment’s precision may actually miss potentially treatable disease that could be addressed through less-precise x-rays.

As major medical centers — including the University of Pennsylvania, M.D. Anderson, and the Mayo Clinic, among others –- invest hundreds of millions of dollars in building the football-field-size buildings needed to house the proton accelerators and in light of rapidly rising health care expenditures, we’re forced to ask, “It Costs More, but Is It Worth More?”

It seems that Mayo Clinic President and C.E.O. John Noseworthy might have an answer in several years, after spending more than $360 million building two new Mayo proton beam facilities, inevitably passing at least some of these costs on to cancer patients. Noseworthy states that Mayo, along with other proton centers in the U.S., will enroll patients in clinical trials once their proton facilities are up and running. But even if the results of the planned phase III clinical trials show that the protons are no more effective than photons, Mayo and others would still continue to use the machines, given their substantial up-front investment in the technology.

In his editorial, Noseworthy also claims that “hundreds of manuscripts” were reviewed over a six-year period to research the effectiveness of the treatment. Yet, he does not cite a single study, and doesn’t refute the lack of randomized clinical trials, the gold standard of clinical effectiveness assessments. If proton beam therapy does, in fact, produce more effective treatment outcomes, improve quality of life for cancer patients through reduced side effects and minimal damage to surrounding tissue, it may be a worthy investment for a wider population of cancer patients. But until then — show us the data!

During a town hall in Keene, New Hampshire this morning, Rick Santorum told a mother whose son survived cancer that people with pre-existing conditions should pay more for health care coverage because they make poor health care choices. While specifically exempting the woman’s child from personal blame, Santorum insisted that the sick cost more to insure and insurers should charge them higher premiums:

MOTHER: The comments I heard you make in New Hampshire, comments that you support insurance companies’ right to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions and that you also agreed with higher premiums for people who are sick, well my son graduated college and I pray that he gets a good job. Why is it alright for him to possibly be denied health care insurance or have to possibly pay a fee that he would not be able to afford or for a company not to hire him because he was five years old and he had cancer? …

SANTORUM: Insurance works when people who are higher risk end up having to pay more, as they should. In your case, your son obviously did nothing wrong. Obviously there are a lot of other people that increased their health risk that did do things wrong and as a result, it resulted in higher health care costs.

Watch it:

The woman asked the question in response to remarks Santorum made in Merrimeck, New Hampshire, where he defended insurers for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and argued that individuals who are sick should pay higher premiums. “I’m okay with that,” Santorum said.

At today’s event, Santorum claimed that the pre-existing conditions clause in the Affordable Care Act — which will prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them more for coverage — would increase health care costs because people would wait until they’re sick to purchase coverage and refuse to heed the mandate. But as the Massachusetts health law demonstrated, the mandate will likely encourage younger and healthier people to purchase coverage before they fall ill and help reduce the number of so-called “free riders.” Reform also expands the risk pool so the costs of the sick people are paid for with the premiums of the healthy. Once they fall ill, their costs will be borne by the next generation of healthy beneficiaries.

The health care industry is donating heavily to Rick Santorum’s surging presidential campaign, as the former Pennsylvania senator implores voters to “trust” private health insurance companies to lower health care costs and touts his record of supporting greater privatization of Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, Santorum is now “getting a second look by many after his virtual tie with GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses” and has raised $21,000 from top executives of BlueCross in South Carolina alone:

In total, a dozen BlueCross executives and their wives donated to Santorum, according to the federal data. A review of other GOP candidates’ disclosures did not find similarly sized donations.

The $21,000 in donations from BlueCross executives to Santorum — all given between late June and September — come from the company’s top brass. The donations included $2,500 from the company’s president and chief executive David Pankau and $2,000 from retired CEO and current board chairman Ed Sellers.

The support is not surprising. Santorum advocates for policies that would allow companies to avoid state-based consumer protection laws and sell coverage to the healthiest — and most profitable — beneficiaries, supports high-deductible insurance plans, health savings accounts, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The industry has returned the favor by donating some $3 million dollars to his Congressional campaigns and rewarding him with consultant and lobbying jobs in his post-Congressional career.

While in the Senate, Santorum also “sponsored at least two Senate bills and pushed to amend a mammoth Medicare overhaul” to include the extra spending that benefited “Universal Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based hospital management company.” After leaving Congress, “Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year.”

Asked about the apparent conflict of interest during an appearance on the Laura Ingraham show this morning, Santorum said, “I was on the board of a public company that because of my work on health care.” “I’m very proud of that work, I’m very proud of the company. You know, I have to work!” Listen:

Lawmakers across the nation pursued a record number of reproductive health and rights-related provisions in 2011, a new report from the Guttmacher Institute finds, enacting 135 measures in 36 states — “an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.” Sixty-eight percent of the provisions — 92 in 24 states — restricted access to abortion services:

Here is a sampling of 2011 in abortion law:

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