Eight days after getting roundly-chastised for holding an all-male anti-contraception, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) admitted on Friday that the episode did not go as well as he expected.

“I won’t call it my greatest success to get a point across on behalf of the American people,” said the six-term congressman.

Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, held a hearing on February 16 to discuss the Obama administration’s new regulation that requires employers and insurers to provide birth control coverage. During the hearing, Issa prohibited a woman who supported expanding access to contraception from testifying.

However, after enduring more than a week of embarrassment in the media, Issa was chastened while speaking at the California Republican Party’s Spring Convention in Burlingame:

ISSA: Right now there are attacks on the Constitution. Some of them are subtle, and some are less subtle. I’m just going to relate one thing to you. Last week there was a hearing that was spun, it was terrible spun. We all saw it. I won’t call it my greatest success to get a point across on behalf of the American people.

Listen to it:

One need look no further than a picture of the witness table at the hearing on women’s health to recognize why the episode was heavily criticized:

Hat-tip: @lhfang

Fred Bauer has poured over the new health care data in John F. Cogan’s, R. Glenn Hubbard’s, and Daniel P. Kessler’s “The Effect of Massachusetts’ Health Reform on Employer-Sponsored Insurance Premiums” report and points out that health care premiums in the Bay State have grown at a lower rate since the passage of Massachusetts’ signature health care law in 2006.

Relying on data “for average health-insurance premiums from the federally sponsored Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), this report suggested that, up until 2008, these reforms led to a relative increase in health-insurance premiums.” But new numbers through 2010 shows that “Massachusetts’ health-insurance premium growth declined relative to the nation as a whole in the years since Romneycare has been enacted“:

Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2002-2006: MA: 40%; US: 34.50%
Increase in employer-sponsored family premiums 2006-2010: MA: 19%; US: 22%

Increase in individual premiums 2002-2006: MA: 32.70%; US: 29.10%
Increase in individual premiums 2006-2010: MA: 21.70%; US: 20%

Look:

While it’s difficult to know how much of the decrease can be attributed to the Massachusetts law — which focused on expanding access rather than controlling costs — (versus decline in utilization as a result of the recession and other factors), the very fact that the law did not meet the doomsday scenario of critics and cause premiums to skyrocket is significant. (In fact, Massachusetts had the third-lowest average family premiums in New England by 2010, Bauer notes).

Ezra Klein notes that we may already be seeing a very similar trend with the Affordable Care Act, which grew out of the Massachusetts experience. The latest spending projections found a “$275 billion (5.6 percent) reduction [in health care spending] for 2020, compared with pre-reform estimates. Moreover, that projection represents a cumulative reduction of $1.7 trillion over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020.” The numbers suggest that providers may be becoming more efficient in preparation for the ACA’s reductions in Medicare reimbursements and updates.

When a woman in Alabama seeks an abortion procedure, she already has to sign that her doctor has performed an ultrasound and that she either viewed the ultrasound image or rejected seeing it. But state Sen. Clay Scofield (R) is pushing SB 12, a bill in the Alabama legislature that would mandate the physician “to perform an ultrasound, provide verbal explanation of the ultrasound, and display the images to the pregnant woman before performing an abortion.” The physician could also require the woman to submit to a transvaginal ultrasound — “in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced” — if she or he determines it necessary.

A Senate committee voted 4-1 on Friday to approve the measure, and the state Senate is expected to vote on it early this week. Even though studies have proven that viewing an ultrasound does not lead women to not have abortions, the bill’s sponsor says he hopes it will:

Scofield said he hopes that, if signed into law, his bill will stop some abortions. Though the bill states a woman can look away from the ultrasound image, Scofield wants her to see it.

“So she sees that this is not just a clump of cells as she is told,” he said. “She will see the shape of the infant. And hopefully, she will choose to keep the child.”

The bill wouldn’t require an ultrasound if an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life, but it does not allow the victims of sexual assault to opt out of viewing the ultrasound.

Last week, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell backed away from supporting the same measure after almost 1,000 women protested the measure and national media mocked the extreme bill. He explained that he backtracked after the state’s attorney general told him that “these kinds of mandatory invasive requirements might run afoul of Fourth Amendment law.” The Virginia House and a Senate committee have passed the ultrasound bill with substitute language from the governor that would not require women to receive a transvaginal ultrasound.

Last Friday, the Colorado state senate advanced legislation requiring hospitals with religious objections to procedures such as abortions “to tell patients that any service not provided because of religious beliefs or moral convictions can be obtained from another hospital.” The measure passed second reading, despite “vigorous objections from Senate Republicans, who called the notification bill a thinly veiled attempt to stigmatize religious hospitals.”

The GOP described the requirement as “religious persecution” that would force some hospitals into a “special little ghetto.” Sens. Kevin Lundberg (R) and Ted Harvey (R) even compared the measure to “Communist Vietnam” and Nazi Germany:

HARVEY: I went to Vietnam a couple of years ago, it’s a Communist country, and they tell everybody they have religious freedom… Is that what where’s saying here in the land of the free and the home of the brave? That you have to affirm that you are a religious hospital here? To have the freedom to be able to provide the services that you think that you should or to have the freedom not to provide the services that go against your religious beliefs. This is religious bigotry, doesn’t matter how you look at it and that is the way the Communist Vietnam government is.

LUNDBERG: Here we have a bill that discriminates. That forces hospitals to put a little patch on them that says, ‘excuse me, but I have religious values and principles and scruples therefore you should consider me to be in this special little ghetto….How about we amend this bill to just put a big star, a big sign. To say this is the building we designated. Would that be appropriate? No. Neither is this bill.

Listen:

The measure needs one more vote in the Senate before moving to the Republican controlled House.