Students at a public Oklahoma high school were given copies of a movie that compares abortion to the Holocaust after a local family asked the principal if they could distribute the DVDs to students, according to a local TV station. The movie begins with images of Hitler and concentration camps before making a comparison between the Holocaust and abortion.

The principal agreed to hand out the anti-abortion film, titled 180, if students obtained parental consent first, but the copies were handed out before parents were notified. One parent told Fox 23 heard about it from her stepdaughter:

“She said that she had seen a DVD in school that basically said that if you have an abortion then you are no better than the Nazis and you will go to hell,” says concerned parent, Marty Angus.

Angus was furious after his stepdaughter came home and told him she had seen it in class.

“She said well, we went to our lockers on break and there was a note that said come pick up your free DVD,” says Angus.

Officials confiscated the movies after realizing how graphic the movie was, but two classrooms saw it first. “I thought it was graphic and a clear violation between church and state and it was just awful to be shown to a high school student,” Marty Angus, whose stepdaughter saw the movie in class, told Fox 23.

The Christian ministry Living Waters produced the movie. When it was released in 2011, the Anti-Defamation League called the fillm “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

One major goal of the Affordable Care Act is to slow the growth in health care spending without compromising on the quality of care. So far, it seems to have done that, bringing projected Medicare costs down by nearly $70 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Now, spurred on by Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), the state that created the blueprint for Obamacare is following its lead.

Last night, the Massachusetts Senate passed a bill projected to trim $150 billion off state medical costs over 15 years. As the Boston Herald reported, health care spending currently consumes about 40 percent of the state budget and is expected to double by 2020. This legislation, passed by an overwhelming 35-2 vote, aims to reduce that burden by changing the way medical professionals care for patients and taking steps to keep Massachusetts residents healthier:

The bill, which was debated over two days in the Senate and required the consideration of 265 amendments, would seek to limit health care cost growth to a level at or slightly above overall state economic growth.

It aims to achieve that goal by encouraging hospitals and doctors to adopt new care delivery and payment models focused on patient outcomes rather than quantity of care provided, and would transition state-funded health care programs away from fee-for-service to alternative payment systems by 2014.

The Senate has also proposed to invest $100 million over the next five years in a transition to electronic medical records, and another $100 million in wellness and prevention programs paid for with an assessment on insurers.

Celebrating the vote, Senate President Therese Murray said Massachusetts “[o]nce again” leads the U.S. on health care. Moving medical records to an electronic format is expected to reduce administrative expenses, while prevention initiatives could cut health care costs by potentially billions of dollars, reducing the burden on taxpayers without negatively impacting care. A study released last year, meanwhile, found that doctors will improve the quality of care if their performance is tracked.

Leaders in the Massachusetts House have their own version of this bill that differs from the Senate version, including a luxury tax on some high-cost hospitals featured in the House version, which Murray said she would not support. An architect of the bill, Sen. Richard Moore (D), said he hoped “the bulk” of the bill would ultimately become law.

-Zachary Bernstein

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gave a mostly non-political commencement address at Georgetown today, but one protester interrupted her speech to the public policy graduate students at Georgetown University.

Almost as soon as she began to speak, a protester began yelling, “Abortion is murder!” Others yelled back, “Get out!” Unfazed, Sebelius continued on her speech in the exact same, chipper tone with which she started.

Watch the interruption here:

Sebelius avoided mentioning the administration’s controversial contraception rule, instead telling the graduates that policy debates can be painful.

Catholics were angry that Sebelius had been chosen to speak at the Jesuit University, citing her role in ordering health care plans to provide contraceptives free of charge at religious institutions. More than 37,000 signed a petition objecting to her visit. And ahead of her speech, Catholic League President Bill Donohue even compared Sebelius to a neo-Nazi.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) held a hearing on congressional Republicans’ most recent attempt to limit access to abortion services in the District of Columbia. The bill would prevent doctors from performing abortions after 20 weeks in D.C., based on the contested idea that a fetus can feel pain at that point. Franks, whose district is about 2,300 miles away from D.C., prevented Del. Eleanor Norton (D), D.C.’s only congressional representative, from testifying about the bill that would impact her constituents.

During the subcommittee hearing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) criticized his GOP colleagues for blocking Norton from testifying alongside the Democrats’ witness, Christy Zink, a D.C. resident who “told of having an abortion at 21 weeks after tests showed the fetus had life-threatening brain anomalies.”

But Franks said late-term abortions were “the greatest human rights atrocity in the United States today,” calling the practice “inhumane.” And when he questioned a doctor who described an abortion procedure after 20 weeks, Franks compared the 20-week ban to animal cruelty statutes:

FRANKS: I find it tremendous — I don’t even want to use the word irony, just a break from human compassion that while we would do the right thing and prevent those things from happening…to animals, but not to human babies.

Watch here:

Women’s access to abortion care in D.C. has been under fire. In December, House Republicans forced a ban on funding for abortion services in D.C. to avoid a government shutdown and even prevented the city from using local taxes to pay for abortion care, reinstating a 13-year ban on abortion funding in D.C. that President Obama overturned in 2009.

But by using a medical procedure as a political football, Franks is necessary health care for women like Zink who want to decide with their doctors what is best for them — without input from Republican politicians.

Last February, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) came under intense criticism when he would not allow Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke to testify in support of an Obama administration rule requiring employers to provide birth control without additional cost sharing.