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.