Since leaving the White House, former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush have pursued humanitarian work abroad in an area that has become particularly contentious for Republicans at home: women’s health. The Bushes recently opened a women’s health clinic in Zambia, a country that has the second highest rate of cervical cancer in the world.

The former president made a push for bipartisan initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS during his time in office. In the years since, he has raised over $85 million for cervical cancer programs. Bush explains his commitment to women’s health in moral terms:

BUSH: We care because we believe that to whom much is given, much is required. And those of us, who live in America, live in the most blessed nation ever and therefore when we see suffering, we ought to act. But the saddest thing of all is to know a lady’s life has been saved from AIDS but died from cervical cancer. And so starting in Zambia, the Bush Center, along with our partners, are going to put on a cervical cancer crusade to save lives.

However, this position is a departure from the one that has recently been advanced by the rest of the Republican Party. Rather than ensuring that women’s preventive care is fully funded across the country because of the moral imperative to “save lives,” as Bush puts it, GOP lawmakers have focused on partisan divides on abortion services and austerity policies.

Republican legislatures have repeatedly moved to defund Planned Parenthood based on concerns about the abortion services that it provides — despite the fact that the organization operates about 800 health centers across the country that provide nearly 770,000 Pap tests and nearly 750,000 breast exams each year, both critical preventative services to detect cancer. Earlier this year, Republicans also proposed a plan to avoid an increase in student loan interest rates by taking money from a preventative health care fund that largely benefits women’s health.

There is much more work to be done to bolster global health, but supporting preventive services for women — rather than cutting funds for women’s health issues across the board, as many Republicans in this country have elected to do — is a good start.

After Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought the office supply maker SCM, laid off workers, gutted pay and benefits, and ultimately shut down the entire plant, former SCM employee Valerie Bruton was left with no choice but to turn to the safety net. In the Obama campaign ad, “Romney Economy,” she recalls:

When SCM shut down the doors, that was the first time I’d ever been in the system with food stamps.  Then I had to get on Medicaid.  It was just, it was rough, but I did it…I had no choice because I had my babies, my babies depended on me.

She was hardly alone. All 258 employees were fired immediately, then invited to reapply for their jobs at a lower wage and a 50 percent cut in health insurance. When the workers went on strike, the plant was shuttered.

Under Romney, Bain Capital replicated this “vulture capitalism,” laying off workers and slashing health care benefits. In 1993, Bain bought Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Less than a decade later, the mill was shuttered and 750 people were out of work. But even more importantly, “workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month,” reported Reuters. The federal Pension Benefits Guarantee Corp had to make up the difference, which were slashed again in bankruptcy court.

Now that he’s running for president, Romney has promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his faith in the free market. Here are two scenarios of how these workers would fare under Obamacare and under Romney’s plan.

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A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that southern states would see the most dramatic reduction in their uninsured populations because of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. The study found that all states would benefit from the expansion, but southern states — many run by conservative governors who have pledged to opt out of the measure — would see their adult uninsured populations drop by about 50 percent. According to the report:

Overall, the Medicaid expansion is expected to result in a decrease in the number of uninsured of 11.2 million people, of 45 percent of the uninsured adults below 133 percent of poverty. States with low coverage levels and higher uninsured rates will see larger reductions (Alabama 53.2 percent and Texas 49.4). [...]

If states fall short of implementation expectations, fewer individuals will be covered and more individuals will remain uninsured. Under this scenario, states would also forgo large sums of federal funding tied to the coverage of those made newly eligible under reform.

With its ruling, the Supreme Court put the fate of millions of uninsured Americans in the hands of the states, and many southern governors have pledged to refuse the expansion of their state programs. Florida Gov. Rick Scott has promised to reject the Medicaid expansion, denying 1 million Floridians health insurance who would have otherwise been covered.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would provide health insurance for 15.1 million previously uninsured Americans. About 11 million of the newly eligible adults have incomes below the poverty level and would therefore not be able to receive any additional help obtaining health insurance coverage under Obamacare should their state not expand its Medicaid program.

While a few southern Republicans are flexing their gubernatorial muscles against the “cost” of Obamacare, the Urban Institute estimates that 21 to 45 states would actually save money by taking the Medicaid expansion. Not to mention the expansion would also help hospitals currently footing much of the bill for uncompensated care.

If Republican governors end up making good on their promise to reject the expansion, they would likely be doing so at the expense of millions of uninsured citizens who would benefit the most from Obamacare.

– Steven Perlberg

The economy may be struggling to create enough jobs to keep up with population growth, but Republicans are busy drafting legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act — a law which the Supreme Court upheld last week and has already extended coverage for thousands of uninsured Americans.

On Monday, the GOP will convene an “emergency” meeting in the Rules Committee so they could hold a vote on The “Repeal of Obamacare Act” as early as Wednesday July, 11. The seven page messaging bill compiles the best Republican talking points against the law since it passed in 2010, but offers only the smallest hint of how the party plans to extend coverage to the millions who would lose it. “The path to patient-centered care and lower costs for all Americans must begin with a full repeal of the law,” the bill says on page six.

This free market mantra may resonate with the GOP base, but it does nothing to improve the economy or solve the health care crisis. Below are 5 consequences of the GOP’s repeal legislation:

1) Millions without coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the GOP’s repeal measure from 2011 found that “32 million fewer nonelderly people would have health insurance in 2019, leaving a total of about 54 million nonelderly people uninsured. The share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage in 2019 would be about 83 percent, compared with a projected share of 94 percent under current law (and 83 percent currently).”

2) Health insurance costs increase. The same analysis concluded that “many people would end up paying more for health insurance— because under current law, the majority of enrollees purchasing coverage in that market would receive subsidies via the insurance exchanges, and [repeal] would eliminate those subsidies.” What’s more, “Premiums for employment-based coverage obtained through large employers would be slightly higher.”

3) Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose access to coverage. Republicans have said that they would not replace the Affordable Care Act’s federal rules prohibiting insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. Instead, they would encourage states to form expensive high-risk pools to cover the sick or, alternatively, leave them to find their own coverage in the individual market — where many will likely go uninsured.

4) Medicare in disarray. Approximately 100 million Medicare claims are processed each month using a formula that was altered by the Affordable Care Act. Should the law be repealed, new rates could not be calculated under the old, pre-ACA formula until after a rulemaking process that can take months before is completed. The result would be that Medicare would not be able to pay doctors for what could be many months.

5) Deficits increase by billions. The CBO predicts that “as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in the vicinity of $230 billion.” Repeal would also “increase federal deficits in the decade after 2019 by an amount that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP.”

A Connecticut family whose son is struggling to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt has hatched a plan to pay it off by selling an 84-year-old home run baseball hit by former New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig in the 1928 World Series.

The ball has been in Elizabeth Gott’s family for generations, since her great-uncle caught it in the Yankee Stadium stands. Gehrig, a Hall of Famer, hit the home run off of Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, and another Yankee legend — Babe Ruth — was on base, according to the Associated Press. But now the family heirloom is up for auction thanks to the rising costs of medical school and the burden of student loan debt, the AP reports:

Hunt Auctions plans to sell the ball Tuesday at the All-Star FanFest in Kansas City, Mo., and predicts it could fetch $100,000 to $200,000. Online bidding has already begun, with the top bid at about $37,000 as of Thursday. [...]

Michael Gott, who is in his last year of residency, said he was surprised at the potential value of the ball. He said his medical school debt was nearly $200,000.

Gott’s situation, famous baseball excluded, is not at all unique. The cost of medical school has skyrocketed, rising 165 percent at private colleges and an astounding 312 percent at public institutions in the last 20 years. Just as student debt has soared over the last two decades, medical school debt has ballooned. Doctors are $2.3 billion in debt, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the average medical school graduate in 2010 left school with $158,000 in debt. Nearly a third, meanwhile, were like Gott, carrying at least $200,000 in debt out of school with them.

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney’s top campaign advisers broke with the entire Republican party and insisted that Obama’s health care mandate is “not a tax.” Then, on Wednesday, Romney contradicted his own campaign, saying in a CBS interview that “while I agreed with the dissent, that’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the Court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax.” Romney maintained in the same interview that while the Obamacare mandate is most definitely a tax, the Massachusetts health care mandate — which Romney instituted less than a decade ago and which is virtually identical to Obama’s mandate — “was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the Legislature and by me, and so it stays as it was.”

Despite Romney’s public insistence that the Massachusetts health care mandate was not a tax, several official websites of the state explicitly call the mandate a “tax penalty.” The Official Website of the Office of Consumer Affairs & Business Regulation contains a page called “Massachusetts Health Care Reform: Tips and Resources,” which states that:

Starting July 1st, 2007, all Massachusetts residents age 18 and over must have health insurance. Every year, you will need to show proof of health insurance on your state income tax return. If you do not have health insurance, you will face a stiff tax penalty. For the 2007 tax year, this penalty is the loss of your personal exemption. In later years, it could be up to 50% of the amount of the cheapest health insurance plan offered through the Commonwealth Connector. If you need to buy health insurance, many new health plans are now available.

Look:

Another Massachusetts state website helps residents “estimate the tax penalties that you might face if you will be uninsured for part or all of 2011.”

The labeling of the mandate as a “tax penalty” on Massachusetts state websites only adds fuel to the debate of how best to characterize health care mandates. The websites, which are a primary resource for Massachusetts residents to navigate the state’s health care system, directly contradict Romney’s already confusing position on the mandate. Their characterization of the mandate as a “tax penalty” could pose a problem for Romney, who has criticized President Obama for breaking his pledge that he “wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

– Nina Liss-Schultz